I disagree, I think the current approach actually makes for a better and more open web long term. The fact is that either you pay for content, or the content has to pay for itself (which means it's either sponsored content or full of ads). Real journalism costs money, there's no way around that. So we're left with a few options:
Option a) NYT and other news sites makes their news open to everyone without paywall. To finance itself it will become full of ads and disgusting.
Option b) NYT and other news sites become fully walled gardens, letting no-one in (including Google bots). It won't be indexed by Google and search sites, we won't be able to find its context freely. It's like a discord site or facebook groups: there's a treasure trove of information out there, but you won't be able to find it when you need it.
Option c): NYT and other news sites let Google and search sites index their content, but asks the user to pay to access it.
> Real journalism costs money, there's no way around that
I agree, but journals should allow paying for reading the article X amount of money, where X is much much much lower than the usual amount Y they charge for a subscription. Example: X could be 0.10 USD, while Y is usually around 5-20USD.
And in this day and age there are ways to make this kind of micropayments work, example: lightning. Example of a website built around this idea: http://stacker.news
Option a) NYT and other news sites makes their news open to everyone without paywall. To finance itself it will become full of ads and disgusting.
Option b) NYT and other news sites become fully walled gardens, letting no-one in (including Google bots). It won't be indexed by Google and search sites, we won't be able to find its context freely. It's like a discord site or facebook groups: there's a treasure trove of information out there, but you won't be able to find it when you need it.
Option c): NYT and other news sites let Google and search sites index their content, but asks the user to pay to access it.