A couple times on HN there's been an article by a person that took one of those giant b+w LCD displays, married it to small computer, fixed it so it displayed the current front page of the newspaper, and hung it on the wall.
I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it.
The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.
I like that idea a lot. Make an instagram account named "Beautiful Newspapers" and post a picture of the framed homepage of some newspaper every day. Sadly I think it would be a parody account in practice.
People will really go to lengths to spend hundreds of dollars on a frame for a website but still complain about paywalls that cost a few dollars to get through.
It seems disingenuous to claim that the commitment level to get through the paywall on many of the newspaper sites we refer to is just "a few dollars" when there have been widespread and numerous reports (even on this very website) of nightmare-inducing subscription cancellation practices.
But your comment misses the point entirely: An organization's home page is its face. They should at least try to make their face look attractive. Even a newspaper stand shows a nice view of above the fold through the window.
The idea that the homepage is a publication's face is woefully outdated. Traffic flows to stories through social media and SEO, distributed entry points that don't touch the homepage. It's not irrelevant, but this is a disproportionate emphasis to place on it.
I'd love to have such a thing, though I don't want to spend the time building it. I just want to buy it.
The relevance here, though, is your site has to look attractive, like a real front page of a newspaper, or nobody is going to do this for your site.