And who pays for the investigative reports?

Who pays for the academics who spend their lifetimes researching the field we're reading about?

Who pays salaries so the best people can make a living doing what they're truly great at?

Who makes enough money to get big and old enough to gain a reputation? Without which, the news is a hail of unsubstantiated bulletins from semianonymous writers, a wilderness of mirrors and fake news amped up to eleven?

Believing that we can make content totally free is utopian. You might as well ask why to bother paying software engineers large salaries when open source software exists.

In a world where content is free, all that happens is that newspapers become the organs of plutocrats and political groups. If you want to imagine how the internet looks when content is totally free, imagine a Facebook news feed written by the Koch brothers.

Oh, come on man, the academics should would for kudos. /s

Academics are paid with tax dollars.

Assuming this is serious: actually, no. Academics are ultimately paid by a mix of university tuition fees (paid by students) and research grants (which may come from tax-funded entities, but more generally come from charities and philanthropic orgs).

We don't live in the same country FYI.

I'm sure Putin will be very happy to subsidize lots of reporting for Americans coming from Russia Today! There all the content you want! It might not be good for our democracy, but that may not have been included in the problem statement. :-)

Honestly, it's not the Russian propagandists I'm worried about. It's the American ones.

But then it's not free. It's just that somebody else is paying for it. And that quickly becomes hard, when your readership grows. Especially if you are just starting out. Even Wikipedia was at first sponsored by a private, for-profit organisation.