The challenge is, there's no money in that. The money is in serving ads, which depends on serving up upsetting/titillating media 24/7.
Paywalls can't work because the barrier to entry keeps you from getting a sufficient network effect. You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. Such services will simply be outcompeted by the Facebook model.
I think the headlining article's point on open protocols might be the only way to square that circle and I'm not even very optimistic about that working. I think the real disjunction happens when we merge news with a general social feed of every random person's opinion. If you stream your facts and porthole into the broader world through the same framework that you stream advertizing and deranged soapbox rants, then you're conceptually putting all those things in the same box and blurring the lines between them. News articles present themselves more like ads (e.g.". . .and you won't believe what happens next"). Conversations start to resemble ads too, with people throwing out provocative statements to get attention and likes instead of engaging in a more genuine/1to1 way.And the ads start to try looking like news or advice from a 'friend' (read: influencer) to slip past your "this is marketing BS" filter.
The context collapse is what's unsustainable. In the olden days, when forums ruled the web, people got links and memes shared in forums, but the people sharing those things were getting them from other forums or they were finding them in blogs or pages via an RSS reader or just a daily roll of bookmarked sites they would go through. This maintained some cognitive difference between when you're seeing a blog written by an irascible and opinionated shock jock versus a piece in The NYTimes. Even if the person sharing had the point of an article go over their heads or ends up 'eating the onion' on something whatever harebrained aspect of it remains sequestered in whatever subforum they're in if it doesn't get fact checked there. The collapse makes the consumer stop being aware of the distinctions, and it cuts off the small-scale testbeds these things have to go through before they go truly viral. It also drives the producers to not care. So now the NYTimes hires irascible shock jocks as editorial columnists too because nothing matters anymore.
