"Producing quality news content is expensive and people seem largely unwilling to pay for it."

I'm not sure how to precisely formulate this, but it seems to me that an ironic effect of our ever-increasing command over automation, manufacturing, and production, and all the other things that used to take humans but now are done automatically far cheaper, is that in relative terms an hour of human time has become ever more expensive, even as we theoretically have many more of them since we have more people and need fewer people to support them. You can see that in things like how expensive a maid service is in an industrialized country vs. less industrialized ones relative to the average local wealth level.

"Real" news collection isn't really something that can be automated, though. It can be assisted with databases and content management software, but the hard work of digging through facts, correlating them, doing interviews, background checks, and all the other stuff necessary for a really good story isn't getting easier any time soon.

I'm really at a loss as to how this can be made economical in the modern environment, even in theory.