That already exists, and I already use it! It's a Dutch startup. I can browse the latest Dutch newspapers and magazines and pay per article or per issue with as little friction as possible. They've been adding US media, too: I can pay per article for every one you mention as well as Mother Jones, Fast Company, The Economist, Bloomberg, Vanity Fair and Newsweek. What I find fascinating is that they're adding lots of innovations exactly where news media failed to innovate. For example, if the article sucked you can always get your money back. They introduced a subscription service, whereby I pay €10 and get around 15 machine-learning-picked articles per day from all sort of different newspapers and magazines. They intentionally put articles that you might not like in your feed. They add their own clickbait-ish titles (it could be worse) because it really does get more people to read more articles. And they recently added an Instagram-Stories like feature, where it groups articles so that you can easily can catch up on a topic or a newspaper that you like. I kinda love it, even though I wish there would be more high-brow publications in there. I would never take a subscription to 90% of the media I read with Blendle. Now I get to enjoy 450 articles a month that I would otherwise never read, articles can get more exposure and reach more audiences, and media companies get additional revenue they otherwise would miss. Win-win-win.
That's great! I do fear that only blockbuster articles are likely to get read that way, but I suppose that's no different from what social media now offers. Does the machine learning then offer you stuff from, say, the science or business section, and not just front page material? Sure does. Read the Post since Bezos bought it? Their reporting is fantastic, but their titles are now stuff like, "6 takeaways from the Alabama election". Horrible. I'll put up with it so long as the content is good, because I get what they're trying to do.They add their own clickbait-ish titles (it could be worse) because it really does get more people to read more articles.
It starts out by asking you to pick the topics and newspapers/magazines that you already like. This is my selection, for example: It then improves the suggestions based on what you read and the articles that you "heart" (their version of likes). I've taught it to feed me the articles from a magazine that would otherwise cost me €15/mo. It does pick out the best articles, but they're not always the objectively popular one. I told it that I liked my home town's local newspaper, so every once in a while I get an article from them (even though I'm probably one of the five people who use that app to read that newspaper).