You wrote 10 words, but I'm going to reply with a wall of text anyway. I believe the value being discussed above is the value to society of having a well educated populace, which is notably different than the perceived economic value to any individual; the main justification for taxes existing in any form is that there are many cases where people spending their money without intelligent self interest is for the best interest of everyone, including themselves (it's trivial to show how this can be true, see the prisoners dillema).

Having an educated populace has enough value that we have public schools; I don't see how informing adults is any different.

Note that I think there are also a ton of unrelated recent societal changes that make it not economically feasible for the news to be behind a paywall; notably that recent shifts that have dramatically reduced cost of publishing and aggregating have made it extremely easy to republish other journalists work trivially. All you need to do is have a subscription to the NYT paywall and one guy getting paid shit to reword their articles; to any other user they will choose the free content that has the same core information that the other site could never have afforded paying for investigative journalism. Patents on reporting facts are obviously untenable, so I see no real option other than the state supporting the media.