Good journalism takes time, and there are a lot of dead ends. Even entire stories.
One personal example -- in a previous point in my life when I worked as TV news producer, I once thought I discovered an incredible example of government over-spending -- airports in the middle of nowhere Alaska built to handle the largest commercial jetliners. But after further digging, I learned that this really made flights to and from Asia safe; a pilot could opt for one of these long runways in an emergency. Suddenly they didn't seem so pointless -- and there was never a story.
That's the kind of rabbit hole I would not have been able to go down if my entire paycheck was dependent on maximum eyeballs. Could it have been a story? Yes! Was it? No! Was it something I thought warranted a few hours of investigation? Yes.
These various business models all have pros and cons, but ultimately, some form of community investment into media is needed. Whether thats through subscriptions, advertising, donations, or some thing else is still unclear. And of course, on the newsroom side of things, they need to foster the trust that they are looking into things that may turn out to be nothing, but also could be important. We as a society just need to find a way to pay for it.