This article talks about the phenomenon of paid right-wing news:
Clients pay for certain “news” to be produced—and then it is, published on a normal-looking local news site, alongside countless innocuous stories produced by machines as camouflage.
But what’s more important is why these sites gain a veneer of legitimacy. They
[take] advantage of how profit-chasing has blown up the entire concept of “media literacy.” When your local paper’s website is as larded up with spammy-looking ad crud as an illegal Monday Night Football stream, these spare sites cannot possibly look any less “real.” And as newspapers die and people get more and more of their news from social media, fewer people recognize which news “brands” are supposed to be “trustworthy.”
The alternative to running ad-heavy websites is to charge for access. While many well-known publications have done so – NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, FT, even WIRED – the paywall does mean fewer people end up reading articles on these sites. This puts them at a disadvantage to these pseudo-news websites, which rely neither exclusively on advertisements or paywall, but on their patrons whose views they publish as news. This breaking of the business-editorial wall is not luxury a serious publication can afford.
This comment on a Reddit thread says exactly this:
Wapo, New York times, NY Daily news, business insider, wired on and on and on, all these places used to be free and now I’m left with the freaking horrible terrible NY post.
See also: Our series on 21st Century Media, what it will look like, and its challenges