>>mc32+(OP)
Except that's not going to happen. Nearly every relative, friend and acquaintance of mine was a paying subscriber of the news before, but all have since moved to free digital, even though all of them can easily afford to pay for the rounding error. Expecting that whole set of people to go back to paying for news after more than a decade though, is going to be hard. People don't feel that news should be a paid commodity, simply because it's a commodity now. If they Google a topic and arrive at a pay walled site, they'll simply move onto another site that gives it for free. And this is in a world where 50%+ of the audience gets their news third party from social media, and not even news websites in the first place.