Ask Paul: August 17 (Premium)

After a jet-lagged and rain-soaked week at home, here's another set of reader questions to usher in the weekend.
OnePlus 6 update
craigsn asks:
Any updates you can give us on the oneplus 6? You say it is your 2nd phone, so how is it working out?
I love this phone. If the camera were better, I'd replace the Pixel 2 XL with it in a heartbeat.

The issues I have are minor: In addition to the camera, OnePlus uses its own "feed" and I prefer the Google feed. I wish it had the stock Android launcher, but I've been experimenting with other launchers, and there's probably some real benefits (especially around performance) to sticking with the OnePlus version.

The other thing, of course, is Project Fi compatibility. But I've ordered a SIM from Consumer Cellular, and it looks like that service offers the same low (~$25 per month) and transparent pricing model as Project Fi, so maybe it's an option. (I could just enable Project Fi when I travel internationally perhaps.)

It's so close for me. I feel like this would be an ideal phone for almost anyone else (sans the need to use Verizon or other CDMA services).
Publishing
christian.hvid asks:
I subscribe to a handful of prominent publications like the Guardian, Washington Post and Thurrott.com. But like most people in the Internet age, I don’t rely on two or three sources for my news, but rather 20 or 30. I couldn’t possibly afford subscribing to them all, and even if I did, it wouldn’t want to manage 20-30 subscriptions. But I also don’t want to be subjected to annoying ads or having to sneak behind paywalls.

The obvious middle ground here would be an all-access pass, where you pay a flat monthly fee to a broker, which is then distributed proportionally among affiliated news outlets depending on time spent on the site, articles read or videos watched. But 25 years into online publishing, and with thousands of publications having gone belly-up due to non-paying customers, there is still no sign of anything like this coming. (Or is there? The closest thing I can find is Flattr, but that hasn’t really caught on.) Is this just plain old inertia, or is fighting ad-blockers and erecting paywalls simply a better business model, even if it means sacrificing a large portion of the potential readership?
This is a topic I think about a lot, both as a consumer of information and as a publisher. I have subscribed to so many periodicals of all kinds and other content sources over the years. But it's changed a lot, too. One thing I noticed was a big drop in quality at the local level (like the Boston Globe, when we were living there) as news just became too expensive to produce. The Internet has given us a great ability to aggregate content. But it's made it harder for content producers to monetize as well.

I still subscribe to The New York Times, but I killed my Wall Street Journal subscription last year after (I think) 18 years as a subscriber. The reason? The paper's tech stories we...