I don't think that people would suddenly start paying for higher quality news. The ones that can tell the difference can afford to pay now and generally don't.
There's a little classist asshole-ness in my implicit assumptions, I admit. I don't think high quality news is expensive until you go into semi-verticals like WSJ.
It's actually the implicit assumptions about the people that can or can't afford "quality news" that made me raise an eyebrow.
> The ones that can tell the difference can afford to pay now
It implies that if you are in the group that can't afford, you're not in the group that can tell the difference. Which is indeed quite classist.
Additionally, it (directly) implies that people in the group that can afford, also can tell the difference. I'm not sure that's classist, but it's definitely a statement I disagree with. There's more then plenty of well-off people that don't care about "quality news" (and then some more with very questionable ideas about what constitutes it).
(and I upvoted you for admitting, btw)
Reason why I'm putting "quality news" in quotes is because I doubt there's a singular definition of "quality news" that would agree with me and everyone. Additionally, over the years I have seen (Dutch) news outlets vary greatly up and down in their "news quality" (from my own perspective), but their relative prices have pretty much stayed the same. For instance (and this is very much my own opinion, other Dutch people may differ), the free public (state-sponsored) news TV-broadcast has taken a dive in quality towards utter blandness, while certain commercial stations' news programs have been doing some pretty nice journalistic research here and there--whereas before did way more celeb/gossip topics. Certain of the established newspapers, both "intellectual" right as "intellectual" left, used to be quite good but nowadays leave me with a nasty taste of last-century bias (left/right is such an outdated concept in a globalized world where it can mean contradictory things), whereas I recently find myself turning to a (large) Christian newspaper because they've been reporting relatively well-balanced and not-too-opinionated stuff (they also happen to be one of the Dutch papers that are working with the Panama leaks).
