As in, got any “charging-for-content” angles you think might work? Extra points if it has worked before. Extra extra points for market research.
I’ve got one angle, it’s not very good but it’s what I had in my head tonight: Find out who’s downloading and saving the articles you publish on your site. Groups and organizations do this — often they’re government orgs, putting together information for their employees. Your news org doesn’t get anything when they’re saving your stuff to their servers, but, if your news org provided a service that put this news together for them on your site, and charged for that service, those organizations wouldn’t have to spend the time looking for that data, and your news org wouldn’t lose the page views to the people pulling your content for their own uses.
Here’s a better riff on the “news concierge” angle (because, honestly, who knows the information you publish better than you do?): Law firms often have to look up specific information. Many times they call newsrooms looking for that information online. What are newsrooms doing answering those phone calls for free? No, what we need is an information retainer fee. No questions asked or answered until the law firm (or, heck, pr firm) pays up. This is a service a newsroom library could provide.
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I’ve seen something like this with archives (still can’t find the link) where everything is open and searchable, but you can hire a staffer to do the sifting and sorting for you. Your idea sounds like a clipping service most politicians already pay for, so maybe there’s a market for it.
Of course, this would be made easier if news orgs published content in a way that was findable and subscribable, like, “Give me an RSS feed of every article, blog post, and video about Congressman Smith.” This should help with ad targeting, too.