I certainly wouldn't want Google to exclude or even automatically downrank paid sites for exactly the reason you bring up here. If Google didn't show the paid stuff, I'd be unlikely to know it exists. And there's nothing wrong with having to pay for high quality information. I wonder if a payment model that provides the option to pay per article might make sense to allow people who know they're not going to regularly use the site to still benefit from the information. Or maybe not per article, but instead the option to pay for a day of access instead of a month.
I’m all for paying for high quality information, but wasn’t the point of the Web that anyone could participate? For example, I’d rather pay an independent blogger in Ukraine to tell me about the border crisis from their lens than go through a centralized gatekeeper like NYT to have some office worker in NYC opine on the crisis.
Unfortunately Google downranks primary sources and sends secondary sources to the top. Essentially the Web has become cable television instead of a global system for the open exchange of knowledge and information and something about that is super depressing and rubs me the wrong way.
