I don't disagree with anything you write in detail, in fact I think we agree that due to a massive mismatch in supply and demand, until about 99% of existing journalism is culled, nobody is going to make any money in journalism.

Maybe a good analogy is the village blacksmith is hurt and angry that he hung up advertisements on his shop wall, but nobody looks at them, and they're all going to be really sorry when there's nowhere left to put new horseshoes on because posting the spam was the only thing keeping the lights on in his shop. Meanwhile the general population drives by his shop in their cars not looking at his ads, and doesn't really care about horseshoes anyway beyond a general knowledge that everyone knows that everyone knows that horseshoes are really important culturally and a vital part of life in and of themselves, although individually no one actually likes it and no one is willing to pay for it.

And my point is something like if you "need" something horseshoe shaped for crafty project or whatever, now a days you download a .scad from thingiverse, run it thru openscad, run the .stl thru curaengine to get a .gcode, then feed the .gcode to octopi on your printer and pick up your shoe in a couple hours at a cost of about fifty cents of filament. I mean, sure, building a village size blacksmith shop to get my horseshoe would be difficult and expensive, but its unnecessary and practically no one wants horseshoes, so I'm not seeing much of a problem.

What the internet has done is remove scarcity from the equation (to a large degree). Prior to the internet, when all we had was magazines and newspapers, there was actual value in providing what you and the previous poster consider "low quality" journalism. If some of the articles in a tech magazine were little more than slightly reworded press releases, those articles still had value to me because I had no other way (i.e., no medium) to ever see a press release. Similarly, when my local city newspaper published AP articles, that had value because that newspaper was the only place I could read those articles.

Now, however, press releases are published verbatim on countless sites, show up in google searches, etc., and AP articles are published on hundreds of sites, plus Google News, and so when any one particular news site publishes any of this stuff they are providing me with essentially zero value. (It makes me laugh when I click on a link at Google News and it takes me to some newspaper's web site like the Akron Beacon-Journal and then that newspaper throws up a paywall barrier preventing me from reading the article, yet I can see that the article is from Associated Press -- why would I pay money to access content that has nothing whatsoever to do specifically with Akron, that the Akron paper had no involvement in creating, when that content is freely available on a hundred other sites?)

The second way the internet has removed scarcity is the well-recognized fact that there's now far, far more high-quality content available than any human being could possibly read, and much of that is free. Which means a publisher better be offering something really spectacularly special and exclusive, because it makes no sense for me to pay money just to increase my list of stuff that I'll never have time to read. The New York Times is an example of a site I would pay for, if they charged a reasonable amount, instead of the completely ridiculous amount they're actually charging (several hundred dollars per year) -- there's so much other good stuff to read that I'm not going to suffer any pain from not being able to read a few NYT articles a week.

Of course, if there was a workable micropayment system in place, I'd probably pay for even mediocre content, I mean, if it was a penny or something to read an ephemeral opinion column about, say, a sports team I follow, I'd do that sometimes. I'd probably pay several dollars a month even for "low-quality" content, if it relieved me of intrusive craptastic ads, but I'd never pay a whole dollar to a single low-quality publisher, let alone the $5-20 per month that a lot of paywalled sites are trying to get.