Meet Beacon, The 'Netflix For News'

Forbes reporting:
Would you pay $5 a month to support your favorite writer? What if doing so gave you access not only to that writer’s articles, but also to a large and growing body of exclusive work from like-minded journalists?
That’s the idea behind Beacon, a new startup that catchily describes itself as a sort of “Netflix NFLX +0.55% for news.”
Beacon was conceived in response to a problem and an opportunity, says Dan Fletcher, one of the company’s three co-founders. The problem is that an unbundled digital news environment encourages production of clickable journalism: celebrity reporting, buzzy scoops, cute animal slideshows and so on. 

“When the pageview model is the only model that supports journalism, that incentivizes certain things,” he says. “There are just stories that freelancers can’t sell, and it’s not because they’re bad stories.”
On the other hand, social media has made it possible for journalists to market their work directly to readers in a way they never could before. That’s the opportunity.
“Social media’s made it so that writers have stepped out from behind the byline,” Fletcher says. “They have their own personal brands. But no one’s really come up with a clever way to tap that in a way that makes them some money.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/09/17/meet-beacon-the-netflix-for-news/