While I suspect the average hacker news commenter can afford the discretionary income to subscribe to the nytimes and Washington Post, I also suspect most have access to the publications at their local public library, if not more locally at their place of business, or other places with news publications available.
As a "news aggregator site" , I suspect there is some quality increase if the community has enough interest in news to put some of these minimal efforts forward.
The quantity of nytimes articles posted and the popularity of those from votes to comments to thorough discussion indicates that a significant portion of the community derives value from these paid sources.
To be contrary, the times gets many more posts than the BBC, nih, and posts from other available free sources (Berkely, Stanford, MIT student papers or research) seem much more rare.
Holy shit batman. Do you work for the NY Times?
Where hacker news aggregates articles interesting to the technology community, many of the best researched articles are going to be from outfits that are selling articles instead of a captive audience.
Given the ire of digital advertising, invasive targeting, Amazon fake reviews, Facebook uninstalls, and Google avoidance; it seems that paying publishers for articles would be the top course of action to avoid bias, idea pollution, clickbait, etc.
The next similar source of topical information that's not tracking, only selling viewers as consumers, and has any viability is volunteers posting personal non-monetized blogs... Which would lack funding or efforts to journalistically research. That is at least absent state media companies like the BBC.