One key reason utterances that are short on facts and long on psychodrama are now overwhelming mass communications is that electronic versions of responsible print periodicals have taken themselves out of competition for the public’s eyeballs, via clumsy attempts to generate revenue online.

You encounter the results every day on social media:  somebody you know shares a link to an article in a well-established and reliable media outlet, but when you click on it, you find you can’t actually read it, unless you either disable your ad blocker or buy a subscription.

Since the whole purpose of the ad blocker was to keep your reading from being disrupted by a barrage of pop-ups, where did the magazine get the idea you might be favorably disposed to letting them and their advertisers do this to you?

As for their alternative, paying them to read lots more of their articles, the fact that you don’t already have a subscription pretty clearly indicates you’re not interested in doing this.  (It’s possible you might become interested, after reading a few of their articles, but demanding money up front, before they’ve given you any reason to change your opinion, is inherently a nonstarter.)

What these periodicals need is a sensible way to charge you only for what you read.  

Currently, the bank associations that process online payments for them charge such a stiff fee for processing any transaction, whether large or small, that it would be impossible for the publishers to make a reasonable profit from a fee small enough that you’d be willing to pay it to read just one article.

Certain sites with heavy repeat business have already found a way around this conundrum, though.  They sell blocks of content access, so the fee can be spread over multiple pieces of content.  It wouldn’t be all that big a jump for a more enterprising transaction processer to enable you to spread your block of pre-paid reads across many sites.  In such an arrangement, if there was a standard cost to you of a dime per page, you could buy a block of 50 pages from a wide mix of participating magazines and newspapers for $5.00—less than you might spend on a latte. 

It seems reasonable that a good many people would prefer this arrangement to the horrendous experience of today’s ad-funded e-publishing continually throwing trash in our faces while we're trying to read.  

Also, once revenue is being generated directly by people reading online pages, it will become feasible to offer services that advertisers aren’t willing to pay for.