And, since this sort of thinking seems to be quite prevalent on HN: does anyone subscribing to this dystopian view of today's journalism care to provide a single example of a for-profit publisher that they consider high quality?
Because all I can think of when I read about "aggregate[d] timely facts" is the phone book.
Technical and scientific journals, for example, are higher quality than newspapers.
It is exactly relevant to your point. You don't derive value from those sites, you derive value from the content those sites link to.
AP/Reuters are also aggregators, they pull stories written elsewhere into a feed that publishers can use.
At some point, somewhere underneath this pile of aggregation, someone needs to actually do some journalism. And get paid for it.
But seeing as you're stuck on the aggregation aspect, I also directly navigate to several news sources.
The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense designed to bring about political outcomes preferred by the journalists. See my other post in this thread about the FT. If we end this era with most current journalistic outlets going bankrupt and disappearing, fine! There will always be news. If it comes from other people who see journalism as a way to aggregate timely facts rather than push agendas, so much the better.