Investigative journalism has always existed in conjunction with "low-quality mass media" and has always been funded by advertising.
So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.
If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.
If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.
This is why I put the "problem" in quotes - I'm not sure if it can be called a problem. If we believe in people's freedom to choose what they want to read, then it isn't.
When people talk about bringing back the good old days of journalism, they dream of the time when cigarettes were unfiltered and you could make a living researching a single story for three months. Or this Request for Startups talks about making mass media write stories that are good for the society (as opposed to people's immediate reading preferences).
I don't see any good technical solutions for achieving these goals, because these goals require changing people's preferences, and require funding that goes against people's preferences.
I also wish YC gave more details about what they mean when they talk about improving society. What's the metric?
I'm not really sure about the relevance of the concept of "mass media" today when people get their news from more and more fragmented sources.
And the idea that the polarization of media is bad also seems highly questionable. In fact, one of the leading researchers on the question of media bias showed that competition between media (which leads to polarization) could reduce bias (http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/BiasReputation.pd...).
So it seems little hard to believe that for some reason it's impossible to produce investigative journalism with ad revenue.
If you think newspapers were unaware that flashy headlines sell more paper than political op-eds because they couldn't track clicks, you're delusional.
If you think you're going to fix the "problem" by changing what people want, you're even more delusional. To paraphrase a famous saying, you can deliver people journalism that is "good for them", but you can't make them read it.