Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising.

So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.

If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.

If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.