People with something to say will find a way to say it, money or no.
The way this works for sports and music is you produce for free because you love it and are good at it, until you are scouted or discovered or get an agent, and ‘go pro’.
Used to work the same for writing. Can’t see why it shouldn’t just because a few written word performers prefer busking.
I think you believe we can get all our content from local, interested bloggers. We can't. There is no filtering and no curation. There are no stakes in telling the truth because no one has a business to defend. Pulling information together and filtering out the rubbish is long and arduous and it's work. That's what journalism actually entails, not the writing part, which is fairly trivial.
But yours seems to be a typical HN response. "People feel this is important to do without being paid, therefore we should not support them as a society". It is an attitude I cannot comprehend. Something is important to our civil society - why not make doing it a viable living?
I pay for the Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic and others. I would pay more for them, sans adverts.
If you can't produce content that people want to pay for, what are you actually doing?
What they need is money to produce content worth reading.