Bloggers can cite and paraphrase and discuss articles in proprietory pay sites to the point where the public basically knows what those articles say. They can push the discussion forward beyond what the proprietory sites publish. If you want the cold, hard details, you'll have to pay for them, or at least go to a library. Otherwise you may not miss much.
There is a downside to the pay strategies. Proprietory materials don't get as much visibility or discussion, so magazines and newspapers can charge their way out of public debates. I'd imagine that when the New Republic put most of their articles on a pay subscription basis, a lot of people stopped bothering with them.
See this is where you are wrong. Because the "journalists" as they exist today have proved that they DO NOT report any cold, hard details. So they have no value-added. Thus, people are not willing to pay for it.