I think the rule of thumb is free media sucks, paid media is generally a couple notches better than that baseline.

I happily pay for the WSJ and Bloomberg, though admittedly I skip all of the WSJ Opinion pieces because they can be worse than OAN

Yes, non-profit news organizations that mimic the NPR/CPB model are finding traction in lots of communities around the country, and many of them do great work. Most of them are digital "print" publications that do some video here and there. There was also a major shift towards news festivals that did long-form interviews with various types of leaders, many of which are posted on sites like Youtube. Unfortunately, the pandemic has hampered a lot of those types of events.

Recently I've been using Wikipedia as my news source. They have both a current events page [1] and a page summarizing this year's events [2]. I feel like Wikipedia's goal of being an encyclopedia forces out a lot of editorializing. Wikipedia also has the benefit of every article has the in-line links to context through other Wikipedia pages. It also has given me the opportunity to read about news stories that have fallen out of the public eye even though their "story" is still progressing (like the Ever Given blocking the Suez).

To make the articles more readable. I changed my link styling to more closely match the text styling, which can be done directly through the Wikipedia user account (using the "common.css" page).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021#January

In larger cities, there are still newsrooms.

Reuters isn't bad. (I mean, it might be bad for UK news, but it's not bad for international and US news.)