But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc.
The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it?
That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators.
These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit.
There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles.
Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value.
Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click.
If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy.
Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type.
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As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.