I often ponder the principle that
some things should not be for-profit, at least not in the same all-in 'whatever legal means to generate profit' setting in which most regular companies operate. This includes parts of the press, of healthcare actors, and 'baseline human life logistics' such as limited means for food/shelter/transportation for everyone.
Historically (read: empirically, as demonstrated by the real world regardless of what theories think), there are two ways to go about this, both having their set of issues:
- Socializing to some extent, but States are bad bad bad at anything economics (and overspend, mismanage, etc.)
- Non-profit legal statuses, with the appropriate amount of tax exemption, incentives, etc.; but then you enter a world of non-competition which produces abysmally low returns (and even if nobody actually profits, we still need these entities to remain efficient).
I think the ad industry, regarding the press for instance, is just one of the factors motivating the above top/general principle; i.e. that profit-seeking is detrimental to some missions/goals. Nonetheless necessary for said missions to be conducted in the first place (quality journalism, for instance, requires suitable compensation).
I certainly don't pretend to know the answer but a few empirically-motivated ideas emerge as we see this century unfold with its specific attributes.
1 - The creation of a legal status between companies and States: a "Citizen layer" of sorts which shares goals with States (not for profit, on a mission for the public good) but is managed just like regular companies (including competition/anti-trust, regular hiring without elections). This should allow "bad seeds" to die just like bad banks, and the good ones (which would actually make profit, and in time lower costs/increase quality) to thrive.
2 - Giving a "universal wage" to a pre-defined subset of some professions (e.g. N journalists) so as to ensure they exist and don't have to worry about profit (but the competition between journalists remains; as an individual you still have to actually be employed by a news outlet to receive said wages, it's not a right but a finite subvention, it's just removing the burden for that news outlet to make profit to pay you). Obviously there's still competition between news outlets.
There are many, many issues with these ideas, especially drafted hastily like that, but I think these are avenues worth considering. To put a few buzzwords into it, 1 is the idea of crowd-sourcing most of States' work and putting the management back into citizen control instead of elected/officials which are usually not qualified. 2 is just extending the notion of universal income to domains that would be deemed as essential as food or shelter for a population, e.g. information services (press). 1 is generally a weakening of the State where it fails historically, towards a more realistic economically-savvy model, with the added benefit of empowering citizenry as a whole. 2 is conversely a slight re-balancing towards a little dose of 'privately owned communism' when things are indeed of common good or interest (such as information), but limited to money transfers (States don't run anything, they just allocate funds they previously used internally).
Clickbait is just one symptom among many of an unbalanced system (let's not even talk about the general intellectual level of public debate at a time when more people are educated than ever in human history). There's a much larger picture to consider if we are to make our societies more efficient (information being key to democracy, and beyond that to a 'smart', 'informed' population, able to build progress).