"For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism."

Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started. Running a newspaper used to be a fantastic business, because you effectively had a local monopoly on advertising to a geographic area. If someone wanted to promote things in your city, you would be top of their list.

Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc completely decimated that business model over the past 20 years and the news industry is still trying to figure out how to fund itself via alternative means.

Historically news organizations have had very strong mechanisms for avoiding advertisers influencing their coverage - the "editorial–advertising firewall". Reputable new orgs like the Baltimore Banner should have policies like that in place today.

Getting grants is an alternative way and it's how freelancers are able to do reporting for cash-strapped newsrooms. Grants definitely have their own can of worms, though. Things like restrictive reporting requirements, do-not-do requirements, and the dynamics that just come from people giving other people relatively large sums of money.

Yeah, the problem with grants is that even with no strings attached there's still a subtle influence where a publication may not want to harm the interests of the source if that grant since they might not provide more funds in the future.

I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.

> Advertising is how journalism has worked since journalism first started

That is a fair point. Maybe where it went off the rails is when we (collectively) were able to tie attention directly to the stories, and optimize for that. An old school newspaper has a much looser connection between subscriber behavior and advertising choices.

> editorial–advertising firewall

This is a mechanism I am not familiar with, thanks for mentioning it. Now I need to go learn something new!

> For me personally, I feel like advertising is directly at odds with quality journalism.

I think we've seen so many useless ads that this is effectively true but it really doesn't need to be.

Think about say Golf magazine. Is the average reader going to say, why are there advertisements for ball finding glasses in there? They'll probably be annoyed when every copy has one but to see various gadgets that could be helpful in your hobby is nice. Especially because they explain why you might want them and often how they work.

Then think about a TV advertisement. Some guy has a grill and stuff starts flying on screen and eventually they sip from a can of Bud Light. If I drink Bud Light is the entire neighbor going to show up in my backyard? There's really no information gained here except that a liquid product called Bud Light exists and that I should "drink responsibility".

The concept of advertising is useful and should be desirable however the current way it's done is often neither. There's a million things out there and the only way to find them out is by being shown them.