Pretty difficult to come up with a good model for media-level distribution of information. Particularly since everything is inevitably co-opted by intelligence agencies and trolls.
Conversation
It's not the MSM, the conspiracy bloggers or the Patreon journalists: almost all news is fake, and picking out the authentic news is no picnic.
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This isn't a problem solved through "critical thinking skills" (BS PR term - the worst biases are biologically predicated), nor curation (who watches the watchmen?), nor picking to taste (ingroup propaganda).
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And now, most units of news people actually consume (video, text quotes, pictures) are so easily fabricated, even intelligence pros can't decipher it.
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This is a hard problem to end all hard problems, and we treat it like a trivial corruption issue. A bit sad, really.
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My half-lay understanding is that news verification - particularly when you add in fakes, framing etc. - is maybe an order of magnitude more complicated than contracts, payments et al.
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And intelligent, talented, skilled people are having the opposite of an easy time with these significantly less complicated issues.
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Difficult to see news of any modality as better than the yellow press.
Because it isn't. It isn't. Lots of it is worse, too, by wearing the glamour of "legitimacy" or "anti-establishment".
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The con man analogy is a shell game - you buy in, you lose out.
Don't be a sucker.
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The sad part is, for any number of reasons we still need journalists, news outlets, bloggers etc. - but we can't guarantee quality for any of them through any known method.
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If you want to understand the cost of getting it wrong, take one cold, hard look at the Iraq War.