If it were printed newspaper I could go and get one for a few bucks. Digital has nothing to offer of that kind.
As the other poster wrote, how else would you expand your readership?
By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers, and offering the product for sale. Why would it be different than any other business?
It would be ridiculous to expect every SaaS business to offer their services for "a few bucks", and yet, for some reason, people think it is egregious that publishers don't do this. Bizarre. Though, I do have the say the newspaper industry caused this; for years, when the internet was still new, most newspapers gave away their best content. That was a huge mistake; it lead people to significantly devalue news.
> By creating a valuable product, finding potential costumers
> Our websites, as they're designed, are probably a little annoying to people who are not our loyal readership. That's by design;
> again, NOT our occasional readers
As I read it, you are expecting a occasional visitor to stick with your bad-UX site and stick with it despite that, until they at some point came to the site so often that they have learned to endure the bad UX?
But even then, a low-individuality service can be one-off and is expected to be. Think e.g. of a car wash. Or renting VMs in the cloud.
So I don't think newspapers, selling their totally unindividualized, standardized and prepackaged good (can't even pick just the sports section) is anything like a "service" or comparable to most SaaS. However, they continue behaving like it saleswise, alienating their readership
Imagine this loop: Purchase 2 week pass, read bunch of articles, some time passes, wants to read new article, oh well my pass expired..
I know of at least one minor newspaper that sells that kind of pass (1-month non-renewing sub) as well as other subscriptions: https://ilmanifesto.it/tariffe/
It's Italian but the table is easy enough to decipher. "Mese" is a month. "Digitale" is digital (duh). "Coupon" is a scheme where they send you vouchers to redeem the newspaper in shops, and is extremely popular among their readership. "Postale" is the classic system through the post (which can be slow in Italy, hence the voucher scheme). "Sostenitore" is basically a supporter donation.
Sadly they still make less than 10% of their revenue from digital, despite a first-class website and iOS app and Android app. Their revenue from paper is fairly solid and they've now streamlined enough that they could probably survive on that, but they still do yearly donation drives.
I'm not a big listener, but when I want a shot of Italian music I do "Hey Google, Radio Italia Anni 60" - despite the name, they actually play anything Italian from any age, including the last couple of years, and they have their own app so no TuneIn shenanigans for us expats. I used to listen to Lattemiele but it's gone downhill some time ago, too much talk for my taste now.
I don't really listen to Italian radio for news, just follow a few podcasts like this: https://www.spreaker.com/show/qui-un-tempo
I also think what could really change the newspaper industry is making it more feasible to do smaller transactions. Not the "buy one article each" transaction, but reducing the transaction cost for small $ transactions. Right now, to charge $1, Stripe charges $0.30 + 2.9%, or 33%. I know PayPal has a micro-transaction rate but not everyone wants to use PayPal.
I would love to subscribe to a newspaper for $1-4/month, not $10-20/month. I'd probably spend more than $20/month overall, just can't justify paying $20/month for just one paper. But seems transactions costs may make it hard to lower the price to $1-4.