Opinions are good to read sometimes, but neither "opinion pieces" nor copy/pasted "breaking news" seem to qualify as high-standards journalism (especially from organizational outlets). That's the kind of content I would expect to find on Reddit or HN from user comments, not something a 100+ year old business like the Economist or the Atlantic would produce.
Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is (subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites look like the reverse of that nowadays.
This is why I like the Guardian, because they clearly mark the difference between their News section and their Opinion section, "Comment is free", and they keep the news part relatively opinion-free, subject to certain bias on what they choose to report.
Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is (subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites look like the reverse of that nowadays.