> If anything, the need has increased as social media and changing advertising landscapes have made shallow, sensationalistic reporting all the more lucrative.
And your comment:
> There were people among us who would gladly pay for this kind of coverage
It's Friday so I'm going to be optimistic. I'd like to think (maybe fantasise) that we've passed the low point of ad-fuelled, sensational, information-light, polarised, vacuous content. There are some promising shoots, from paid newsletters (e.g. stratechery plus [0]) to search (e.g. Kagi [1]). There are early signs that Browsers are coming back as a topic with Chrome's inexorable slide into increasingly obfuscated ways to slurp data [2] and the (very) early promise of e.g. ladybird [3] as the first genuinely new, ground-up browser for years.
It's never going to be mainstream. As someone once wrote here, the economy is a machine that incessantly drives cost down. Orthodoxy says you can't get cheaper than free - but that presumes measuring cost solely in monetary terms. Widen the definition of "cost" though and what we have now is definitely not free: we pay with loss of privacy, social disfunction and mental health degradation among others.
Challenging the commercial behemoths who benefit from the "free internet" myth is a massive task. Perhaps unassailable. If there's an upside, it's that the long tail - where quality, paid for content and services might thrive - is simultaneously meaningful enough to support a small but thriving industry, and small enough to be uninteresting to the 1000lb gorillas.
That may be fantasy per above. But I'd rather cling to something hopeful.
[0] https://stratechery.com/stratechery-plus/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391412
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EDIT: fixed grammar.