Yeah I see your point, but I'm not that surprised that that model doesn't work for a newspaper. For one thing, it just costs a lot more money to publish a daily newspaper than it does to publish a weekly magazine. Plus, you waste all that money publishing news stories. Even if they're WashTimes-quality biased junk, it's still not a lot of bang for your ideological buck. A magazine chock full of ideologically validating arguments is going to be a lot more popular than a newspaper with just one to three pages of the same. Finally, a lot of those conservative magazines (and moreso the journals like Policy Review) are heavily subsidized by the think tanks that treat them as their very own publishing arm (sometimes this is a literal relationship, as that between PR and the Hoover Institute). The think tank drops all that money on the journal because they want the patina of legitimacy when they publish their articles there. You just don't get that sort of symbiotic relationship with a newspaper (although I will admit that it seems like there's a space reserved on just about every WSJ editorial page for a Hoover Institute missive).

Zing! I smell a thread winner.

Still, a mixed business model that relies on advertising as well as donations is what keeps conservative magazines afloat. I don't think it was too far out to expect that the same system could have worked for an ideological newspaper.