It's silly to say that the only choices are "only ads pay for content" and "everyone pays the same for content". That's a silly level of reductionism and simpli

It's silly to say that the only choices are "only ads pay for content" and "everyone pays the same for content". That's a silly level of reductionism and simplicity which was an outdated model even a century ago, and is absolutely not the way things work today. There are tons of content creators today, mostly artists, who nevertheless give away their work "for free". It's not rocket science how they do this, there are numerous different models for making it work. And some of them are millionaires. At the simplest you can use a pledge drive model, or patreon, where folks who want to pay can and folks who don't or can't pay don't. This has kept tons of public radio and tv stations in business for decades, for example. Another model is to do up-front crowd funding for projects. There are tons of these sorts of projects where the end production is available to everyone for free. There's little reason why journalists can't rely on such models (as indeed some have already). Those are just some among many business models, some of which are already being employed by content creators on the internet.