* LWN https://lwn.net/
* Harper's Magazine http://harpers.org/
* Nautilus http://nautil.us/
I'm not interested in paying for any current-news journalism because as far as I can tell nobody does a good enough job to warrant my money.
First Commercial: "Coming up after the break, we did some investigative journalism for once"
Second Commercial: "Coming up: That investigative Journalism"
Third Commercial: "Still after the break: What you actually want to see"
45 minutes and 10 commercials later: "And after this break, the investigative piece."
And the investigative piece is 30 second long, says that the one person of interest wouldn't comment, and has less information than you could find out using a public portal on your local government's website.
Then you get a 2 minute clip of a funny video from the internet chopped the hell up, with the anchors talking over it the entire time. "Tune in next week. More Americans get their news from ABC News than any other source."
I don't think that assertion holds water, and if you broaden beyond "broadcast" to "mainstream," even less so. I love Last Week Tonight, and they do some genuine investigative work, but a lot of their news coverage is parroting/spinning other people's coverage that they find especially insightful. I'm glad that they're giving broader voice to some of that material, but it would be much more expensive were they to produce it all themselves.
Foreign coverage, in particular, is extremely expensive, and almost nobody in the new media space is throwing serious money at it; it's super important and kept afloat almost exclusively by old-media behemoths who maintain scores of foreign bureaus all over the world -- CNN, NYT, NPR, etc. (Vice is the one possible new-media-company exception, here, in that they do foreign investigative work at all, but they don't maintain a permanent presence anywhere, I don't think.)
Speak for yourself. I'm as dumb as they come.
Over the past couple of decades, I've watched as media companies with legacy business and editorial structures are (largely) unwilling or unable to adapt to new channels of disseminating important information or driving revenue. At the same time they've eroded trust with their audiences through efforts like advertorials in magazines and over-reliance on syndicated national/regional content in newspapers...and pandering in both. The ones that haven't are doing well.
I remember a few years back reading a great piece by the great late writer David Carr who talked about SXSW and the local paper in Austin that spawned it as a great counter-example for how modern journalism as a business can be done well and successfully:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/23/business/media/23carr.html
Those running the big media properties are either going to finally wake up and adapt or die off...meanwhile, there are lots of niche publishers (and I use that term very broadly in terms of channels) will step up and successfully fill the voids they're leaving behind.