Subscribing to a few major newspapers is probably not a bad idea. Otherwise we’ll only see the news/ads FANG sees fit to show us.
Christian Science Monitor is apparently an overperformer (very modest brand awareness and hence very affordable, but generally respected for its journalism).
The problem for me is always which ones? If I were to dig through my browsing history and plot a frequency/frecency list of news-ish sites I visit, I don't think I'd see a small few dominate the list. I wouldn't mind throwing a couple bucks a month at the sites at or near the top, but I can't justify giving each of them even $5/mo, and certainly not the $10-$30/mo most publications charge for memberships. I just don't get that much value out of each one.
I'm still a big proponent of a micropayments system where my browser can automatically send a single- or double-digit amount of cents to the publisher (with my permission, of course) when I read an article. But I have no expectation of something like that gaining traction.
In the era of fake news and clickbait, I'm very happy to shell out some coin for quality news. I've found WSJ to be one of the most objective newspapers out there (along with BBC) since they focus on describing what happens, rather than adding in lots of conjecture.
The opinion pieces are another story though (pun intended), I generally try to avoid those.
Most larger mainstream news with political objectives can also be defined as fake news with a major political bias due to the profits they need to create to stay afloat. Business comes before accuracy in reporting. WSJ and BBC are probably great & accurate for stories about plants and polar bears, but anything of any major significance will be extremely biased in the favor of profit.
Never mind that BBC is funded by royal charter rather than by customers, so they get paid whether people read them or not.
You're confusing accuracy with bias. It is possible to give an accurate account of a story despite having a bias, so long as you're still stating the relevant facts. The bias comes from the interpretation and whether they state the facts in a positive or negative light.
As for biases, WSJ is known to be center-right, NYT is center-left, The Economist is biased towards classical liberalism, etc. When you read the stories you can take the bias into account pretty easily.
It's precisely because the WSJ has a paywall (since 2007 IIRC) that it's not a "garbage site". That dubious honour would go to the hordes of medium.com and elektrek.co links who give their information away because, well, exposure is better than nothing. You get what you pay for.
It's still annoying. I subscribe to the NYT and WaPo. I can't even logistically subscribe to every news site I might get linked to. WSJ is the most obtrusive I've seen in terms of being restrictive towards non-subscribers. And there's STILL no micropayments solution that's widely adopted.
