No.

Information is a public good, in an economic sense. It is not, generally, something people pay for, and historically hasn't been

The initial age of directly-paid content -- a small number of largely business-oriented, small-circulation newspapers, of which the WSJ is a descendant -- existed only from about the mid-18th through mid-19th centuries. By the 1850s, mass-circulation advertising-supported penny papers had become a norm, and a problem, as they were driven by oitrage, hoaxes, scandals, and direct manipulation, the clickbait of the day.

There's a wondrful contemporaneous account of this I cannot recommend highly enough, Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism, from a UC Berkeley lecture delivered in 1909:

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n11

During the 1930s the new medium of radio saw huge debates on public vs. private control of the airwaves. Notably, the US adopted a private model, the UK public, with the BBC, citing the dangers of private and foreign influence. Robert McChesney has covered this in Telecommunications, mass media and democracy: battle for control of US broadcasting, 1928-35:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/telecommunications-mass-media...

Nobel laureate economis Joseph Stiglitz:

"Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, described knowledge in the following way: “he who receives an idea from me,receives instruc-tion himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. In doing so, Jefferson anticipated the modern concept of a public good. Today we recognize that knowledge is not only a public good but also a global or international public good.We have also come to recognize that knowledge is central to successful development. The international community,through institutions like the World Bank, has a collective responsibility for the creation and dissemination of one global public good—knowledge for development."

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Public Good"

http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz

Micropayments fail for the reasons highlighted b Nick Szabo and Andrew Odlyzko two decades ago:

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html

http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/case.against.micropaymen...

A media readers are required to pay for directly is one that's available to few (especially on a global scale), which is incentivised by that revenue stream, and which seeks other forms of revenue, notably advertising, with all the ills that entails, again covered 110 years ago in Hamilton Holt's little book, an summarised by publisher John Swinton, quoted anonymously in that work:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.