BuzzFeed News Is Shutting Down, Company Laying Off 180 Staffers

Movie studios do this a lot - they’ll have their smaller production houses make movies that compete for awards and then the larger big budget companies make the blockbusters that subsidize the other stuff.

Same with book publishing. Big publishing houses probably lose money on most of their literary National Book Award-chasing titles, but the prestige is worth it, if not subsidized by the more mass market books they put out.

A Sunday issue of a broadsheet arguably fits the bill. A normal newspaper and 4x the volume in additional supplements with lightweight content about travel, housing and movies to wrap ads around, sometimes with an insert or two entirely produced by a sponsor. Of course, they started off with news and diversified into lots of sub-papers that pay bills rather than the other way round and their travel listicles are marginally more highbrow than Buzzfeed and there's an argument the format is slowly dying, but the basic concept is the same. Same goes with the commercially successful online version of the UK's Daily Mail having a huge amount of online-only lightweight celebrity content in a clickbait sidebar sitting alongside its more right–wing campaigning style reporting

Its been fairly common knowledge for years that "Buzzfeed News" was an actual reporting arm.

The question you pose insinuates that you assume "Fox News" is mostly Simpsons and Family Guy reporting.