I'm sorry but I just cannot imagine a way to make ad-supported media work. It can't and shouldn't work. Advertisers want to spend money to misinform the public; you can't then take this money to fund news, an operation that's ostensibly supposed to inform the public.
It's just a fundamentally insane business model. If you believe in news for news' sake, then ad-supported news is... trying to do enough good to outpace the harm being done by the funding mechanism for the news.
In the internet era, most ad-supported outlets that were doing interesting work were managing this kind of by scamming advertisers? Like the economics of it never made sense on the web, at all, but advertisers were unsophisticated so they kept putting money towards these outlets.
As advertisers became marginally more sophisticated, there's a drive to guarantee that ad dollars were translating to the deliberate harm that advertisers want to inflict. That drive is always going to choke out outlets doing interesting work, because advertisers would prefer a world where people are just groping through a maze of chumboxes.
