How much would you pay?

To read an article in the Times, or the Post, or the WSJ?

In the first two instances, you get a fixed number of articles per month, before you hit the paywall.  In the latter case, there are somewhat random “free” articles which I presume are whatever the editors want to circulate freely.  There are ways around it, of course — multiple browsers/computers, clearing browser history, reading in a private window.  In the case of the Washington Post, if you have a .gov or .edu e-mail address, you can establish a user account on that basis for free access.

Der Spiegel, on the other hand, a German newsmagazine similar to The Economist, operates with what’s called a “buy now, pay later” model, in which certain stories are available only partially, with the full story visible only with a EUR 0.39 charge, and the charge actually applied when you hit a EUR 5 threshold.  So my husband has started his bar tab — I’m not sure if he’s hit the EUR 5 yet or not.  And this makes sense to me as a middle ground, and an alternative to the all-or-nothing of needing to buy a full subscription.

Would you do this?  And how much would you be willing to pay for the sort of substantial reporting that might not necessarily be available in your local paper, or for a “long-read” in, say, The Atlantic?  Because it seems to me that this model could be a solution to the newsmedia’s “free content” problem — but I’m not aware of any other site besides Der Spiegel that’s adopted it.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brownsville_Herald_Newspaper.jpg; By Dontbesogullible (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons