So all I have to do is flash my AP patronage receipt and stroll right past all the paywalls? No? Then that is not what I am describing.

If you're the famous Wall Street Journal, you might be able to manage your own paywall--one that people actually pay to get through. The sort of written content that people will actually pay for could come from anywhere, though. It is organizationally impossible for every individual reader to separately manage their payments relationship with every individual writer. While it may be beneficial for WSJ to keep their own paywall, it cannibalizes the market for paid journalism from other sources by not only taking dollars from people's budgets for discretionary spending, but occupying one slot from the number of different vendors people are willing to patronize at once.

When I was young, my family got both local daily newspapers, plus the New York Times on Sundays. This was largely because my father knew quite a lot of people in the journalism business. The majority of households would choose one local daily or the other, if they even bought a newspaper at all. It wasn't just about cost, but also about the number of newspapers any normal person could read in one day. If you bought either paper, you got access to the AP, Reuters, and UPI stories, because the distribution channel was limited by the capability of putting the newsprint on doorsteps. If your newspaper did not have a reporter on site where something interesting happened, you had to get that story off the wire. And readers got access to the wire through your paper. It didn't matter which paper, really, because they both used the same wire.

It therefore makes sense for all [non-WSJ] papers to band together and make their own nigh-universal paywall, which would encourage those people who will only buy at most one "newspaper" to make it the big fat one with all the wire stories, rather than the niche one that goes deep on a few things that they might not even care about. Those willing to buy multiple "papers" can then also buy their way through the WSJ paywall, but that group is miniscule compared to those who want to buy one paper that can serve 99% of their text-and-photo-based news demand in one package.

When all those newspapers out there have their own paywall, they are implying that people are somehow willing to not only pay for, but also manage a business relationship with, dozens of different newspapers, all of whom have slimmed down markedly from their heyday as print-only editions. If they don't manage their own decline by merging on their own terms, they will continue to get bought by outside national media organizations that will change their editorial focus to align with the new owners' interests. That will make them practically indistinguishable from television news, and a lot of people, myself included, will just stop reading altogether. I'm not going to pay more for a pile of robotic press-briefing reporting and thinly veiled propaganda. I'm not going to support a fourth estate that is all cheerleader and no watchdog. And I'm certainly not going to support clickbait fluff to drive ad revenue.

And on aggregator-discussion sites like HN, those niche-paywalled articles just won't exist, because not enough people will be able to read them to start more than a small number of conversation or commentary threads.