Monetization is definitely a hard problem. If I have any advantage it's that my costs should be a lot lower, since I'm happy pointing people at pre-existing articles instead of writing my own. Unfortunately I don't think I have any great insights that the news industry hasn't already had on it.
In the end, I suspect I will be using advertising, even though I do find that industry pretty distasteful. Low costs mean that if I do go down this route I should be able to keep it pretty unobtrusive and minimal, which gives up short term income but is likely a good long term tradeoff.
I don't think it makes sense to put the core product behind a subscription wall. Apart from the issue of "would people pay for it", it's the sort of thing that benefits from network effects. I'd be shooting myself in the foot if I tried. Conceivably the tools I'm making to help gather the information could make a useful product for professional researchers of various kinds (hedgefunds, paralegals, etc) - but that would be more of an offshoot and not something I could really pursue before gaining traction.
Another idea I've had (and again, this is largely ripping off existing monetization schemes), is that it might make sense to have a section of the website dedicated sagas about "products" (e.g. "IPhone 17"), linking to things like reviews and spec sheets, with affiliate links to amazon. Conceivably you could attract the /r/buyitforlife crowd to something like this, and make it a force for good in the world.
Just asking for donations seems to work to some extent to (see The Guardian, and wikipedia) - though given how hard they seem to need to push for them I'm not sure that's a route I really want to go down.
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Like you say, there's a sack of coins somewhere in here. I'm willing to believe that if I make a useful product that people like, I'll figure out how to pick up at least a few of them.