I think it boils down to the difference in how we consume these things. You typically go directly to a streaming service with the intent to browse and consume its content, but few people directly consume news sites. More often you’ll either end up on a particular site from a web search or from a link from an existing content aggregator like facebook, reddit, or lemmy. Since you don’t seek out a particular news platform for regular consumption you feel less inclined to pay an ongoing subscription.

That does raise an interesting idea to me though. What if instead of a normal month to month subscription a news service offered a pre-paid per article account. So, say 25 cents an article say and you can purchase 40 articles for $10, then each article you view deducts from your account. When you get low on remaining articles it can prompt you to top up your account or you can have it auto-renew. Personally I think I’d be far more inclined to something like that because the cost would scale based on how much I actually used the service rather than being an ongoing monthly cost for something I use very sporadically.