Ie. Being paid for it is an insufficient condition for "real journalism", though it may or may not be a necessary one.
[1]. And I suppose it is implied that the NYT doesn't (always?) meet those factors.
I still don't know what the specific alternative to "paid journalists" is. I don't need a random HN commenter to tell me that there are humans in newsrooms and sometimes they display bias, make mistakes, or even lie on purpose. But injecting comments like the original don't actually add anything to the conversation other than a generalized paranoia. If return0 has specific complaints, they should articulate them.
But the larger issue is that I don't really know what you're comparing professional journalism to. Is there actual volunteer journalism that attempts to enforce editorial standards and faces consequences when they fail?
In terms of US-based journalism, the industry has been gutted by ours truly. My observation is that there's hardly any traditional newsmedia content worthy of the HN front page and that the NYT is one of the very last daily papers worth reading along with the WSJ and Washington Post. The NYT has real journalists given the budget to do long form and investigative reporting and cultural commentary. That they would be one of the few general news outlets consistently producing content relevant to SV and tech should be no surprise.
If you'll forgive me for reading between the lines, you dislike that the NYT's particular bias is being over represented on HN. But all media has always been biased and the only treatment is a diversity of sources. Unfortunately there's no longer much diversity when it comes to high-quality reporting, so even if HN's audience would want to upvote a different viewpoint, the papers that used to publish those viewpoints have long since turned to clickbait.