As a journalist or a publication, you do need money to survive, and if you don’t survive then how can you make a positive impact with fair reporting? The choice is then between ads, financing, and truly surviving off your subscribers by being so expensive that only the top 1% can afford to read you. Any option compromises you in some way, choose your poison to the extent possible.
Despite all that being one huge grey area ethically speaking, I still think that without professional reporting all we’d have is a network of mini-influencers misrepresenting reality into their respective bubbles on Twitter/Substack/TikTok, either for likes or to further whatever hidden agenda they or their friends may have. It’s a good thing to have a job description and years of education that ingrain certain principles[0].
It’s doubly bad, though, when you betray those principles; being a journalist is (or ought to be) much like being a cop or a doctor—for the mechanism to work properly, people should be able to trust you to act in their interest rather than own personal gain (and you should deserve the trust).
Unfortunately, I don’t see a good way for such a model to persist. We’re losing trust in traditional affordable mass media, often for good reasons.
[0] Most importantly, to be cognisant of your biases—which indeed includes selecting which story to report on, selecting which aspects to mention, etc.—and to compensate for them.