Even prestige publications like The New Yorker use freelancers. This is the same thing, it’s just lower brow content.

That’s not a fair comparison, The New Yorker has always had a different relationship with its writers. A freelancer who writes for The New Yorker is likely a highly respected journalist/author/other luminary. Their staff writers are, I believe, technically contractors as they’re not W2 employees.

Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.

The New Yorker gets high tier freelancers, other outlets get dogshit freelancers. It’s the same underlying model.

This is not at all the same thing. The New Yorker pays its freelancers. In the example in the article, the money is flowing from the content producer to the publisher, meaning it's an ad.

They have literally run “native ads” for a decade which are ads specifically designed to appear to be content from New Yorker writers.

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-new-yorker-jumps-into...

Also not good, but also not at all like freelancing. Freelancers are paid. Advertisers pay for placement.

You mentioned what is or isn’t an ad, my point is the distinction is a lot less clear than you think, and it always has been.

While it’s good more people understand the business of news, this is all out in the open and has been for years.

Who is the mythical non-echo-chamber informative challenging news source?

That would be an aggregator, like allsides.com

I think "non-echo chamber content" is only valuable as long as all of it is similarly high quality. In my opinion, reading diverse but low quality content (e.g. filled with misinformation, a lack of concrete information, and a lack of sensible reasoning) is not helpful.

I had a subscription to the Wall Street Journal for awhile and while I can't say that's what the GP is referring to, it absolutely sounds like the kind of deluded crap a WSJ subscriber would say to justify spending $40/mo on that crap to themselves :D

propublica.org is pretty good.

They wrote that these things can be found in paid sources.

Lots of people pay for The New York Times and they still operate their affiliate link site Wirecutter.