I think Wall Street Journal/FT are different though, people pay for those because it's a valuable curation of financial/economic news and presents political news through a financial/economics lens and not entirely through the traditional left/right political spectrum lens.

Call me cynical, but what makes you think people subscribing to more politically-oriented publications are doing it because they want truly something accurate and not because that publication confirms their biases?

Again, YouTube controls its own ad network. It has full control over what advertising JS is being served to users. It’s also a technology-first company, where advanced web application development is a core competency.

News publications aren’t like this at all. They’re embedding Adsense or some other third party ad widgets, probably at the direction of management. They’re serving whatever that black box ad API returns, which could be a lot of things. I haven’t really looked that hard, but are you aware of an ad network that pays comparably to Google that pledges not to track people? It’s kinda hard to imagine that such a thing exists, given the ad industry’s pervasive encroachment on privacy.

Also, most publications I’ve interacted with don’t have technical stakeholders at the executive level, and web developers are a back-of-the-house role. They’re not nearly as technically capable as a YouTube

You make it sound like some conspiracy that journalists rely on advertising tech while publishing negative stories about it. Journalists aren't the ones building the CMS features for their publishers. I used to be a developer at a newspaper in 2016, and most of my coworkers on the journalism side didn't understand the business side of the paper, it wasn't their job.

But I'll emphasize my previous point again: newspapers would die without online advertising revenue. Even with online ads, publications around the country are being sold at record low prices and shut down or kneecapped by private equity groups. I highly encourage you to read up on the financial landscape of news in 2019, it's terribly grim.

Massive contraction is occurring the industry, prompting major consolidation of media groups. Companies like Digital First Media acquire large collections of papers and immediately fire half of the newsroom, and this is happening nationwide.[0]

I get that it's so easy to point fingers at news orgs for using online ads, but they didn't really have a choice. When companies like Google and Facebook took control of the distribution and access of content, newspapers became their customers in order to stay alive.

0: https://www.inquirer.com/business/reading-eagle-newspaper-di...

In fact, maybe all journalists everywhere should just focus on investigating the organizations they write/work for, and stop talking about anything else until those places are paragons above criticism, right?

Maybe next up: only debt-free people/orgs are allowed to talk about deficits?

(Sure, journalism, like most other professions, can use introspection, including the topic of how tracking works, but if there's any case that something needs to be said every time the topic of tracking comes up -- and it's not clear that it is -- that should largely be an editorial call.)

No, that's something completely different.

These writers aren't actively implementing the advertising software. They're not "following orders" in anything with respect to ad tracking simply by being a contributor on the platform. At worst, they're complicit by working for the company that utilizes it. Frankly though we all complicit in this stuff one way or another even if there's the illusion that we aren't by some degree of separation.

(EDIT: Deleted irrelevant argument)