Well there are 3 alternatives.

Ads, which everyone on here would endorse blocking, so that’s out.

All journalism becomes volunteer work, running off of optional donations, which seems unlikely :D

Or all journalism becomes publicly funded via-taxes. This is probably the optimal option but I think most people would agree that ALL journalism being government funded has a ton of risks.

This is because the Internet killed journalism's revenue model. In the past a big metro daily had three main revenue streams; subscriptions, newsstand sales and classifieds/advertising. Newsstand sales is the only leg that didn't get gutted by the internet, so in order to keep it viable, they have to charge more than they used to, but even then, it's just not really cost efficient and many major metro dailies no longer print a hard copy version.

One problem with journalism is that since everyone consumes it in one way or another, everyone imagines that they have an informed opinion about it, but unless you went to j-school and/or have worked in the field, you probably don't.

Because classified ads used to pay for the paper.

Heck, 'The Advertiser' used to be a popular name for newspapers.

Newspapers used to be full of ads and were also subscription based. You could buy a one off from a paper for relatively cheap, but their primary income was ads and subscribers.

This seems like a common theme. There are just so many things to subscribe to: Netflix, Spotify, New York Times, Amazon, Audible, individual app store applications, Paramount+, Hulu, Peacock, NPR+, Disney+, etc. Just keeping track of it all is complicated. And all content producers want to maintain the subscription framework, too, passing the costs on to us. This is a little off topic, but it still bugs me that Netflix became a content producer. I think it would have been a cleaner/cheaper arrangement if they'd remained a subscription service only.

With so many shows getting canceled, or even un-confirmed and then obliterated from existence all for tax write offs, I'm kinda soured on Streaming these days.

Hopefully the WGA and SAG strikes are successful and result in streaming improving again, back to how it felt during the mid 2010s.

Unskipable ads when I'm browsing my files on my phone, how fucking obnoxious can you possibly make them?

I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.

Idk, 15 years ago I was watching cable and 1/3 of my time was spent subjected to ads on a paid service. I think I prefer them now lol

Firefox has an autoplay block setting, and I've never had it fail me.

That’s why I use an inverted ad-block list. I see ads unless they get intrusive or unreasonable, and then I enable blocking on the site.

When I had more income I paid for the NYT, but tbh they've made enough questionable editorial decisions lately that I've decided it wasn't worth it. The Guardian isn't paywalled at least.