Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.

But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.

I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.

Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.

And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.

You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?