Not true. There are many operations - most obviously tg group based ones - with specific hours and customer requirements (at minimum a solid reference by a current customer).
It's perhaps still more common to not be too picky but definitely not by all.
- he had fixed opening hours, 3 days per week.
- changing but legally rented locations
- only access was trough recommendations and only every 3 months or so
It was an exceptional well done operation. However it was cannabis exclusive and Switzerland is not too strict about these things in general. The reason it stopped was not even related to the illegal activiy
It seems to me they are more interested in propaganda than publishing news now.
You mustn't compare a newspaper article to the Platonic ideal of articles, but to the existing alternatives. What paper do you recommend with the breadth and wit of The Economist?
If an article can convey some of the former, you're smarter than before. Not as smart as an expert, of course! But how can one short article turn you into an expert? That is an unreasonable goal. Every summary of a complex topic will contain and gloss over some factual errors.
Take, for example, an article explaining big-O notation and conveying that sorting can't be faster than O(n log n). Now, you, as an expert, say, "Well, that's not true, that only applies to algorithms with pairwise comparison; we can do better if the domain is very restricted and known a priori, etc. etc.". Fair enough. But still better than not having read the article.
In fact, I think that The Economist does exceptionally well on that front. It will introduce a topic to you, outline the major questions/developments/points of contention, summarised from talking to several experts, and then often (quite opinionated) give a verdict.
You should not take it as gospel, obviously, but it would often reflect the consensus of the experts (of a certain school, sure), but also give you enough background and opposing positions that you can do your own research to dive deeper if you so wish.