I just wish there was some type of identifiable credit / penalty system for writing accurately as a news source. And this would include quotes / retweets. Never been a better time to be wrong about everything.
This is a misunderstanding of the problem. Effort is made in both cases. In one case effort is made to find verifiable truth as a service. In the other effort is made to provide eyeballs to advertisers.
What's "solely free"? Does the ad-driven model count as free? Why do you think an outlet that works for you will necessarily deliver better quality news that the one that works for advertisers? There are obvious bias downsides to both.
The ad-driven model does count as free, and it's far less likely to deliver better quality news than a subscription service users pay for. The core metric for ad-driven news sites is maximizing views—it doesn't matter how you get views as long as you get them. This means free sites are heavily incentivized to be the first to break a news story even if the details are wrong or sparse. Sure, they'll issue corrections and updates later, but only a small percentage of the initial viewers will ever see these, and there's essentially zero cost for having made the mistake.
The core metric for subscription news sites is minimizing churn. A mistake will cost a subscription site subscribers who have a massive lifetime value. These sites are heavily incentivized to report high quality, accurate news even if they're not the first to break the story.
Your cure is worse than the disease. The second such a system existed, it would be gamed to hell and back, and nobody would believe it anyway since they'd all angrily insist that "you shouldn't have counted X" or "you should've counted Y more" and it would just turn into a war over who got to control the system and use it to deplatform their enemies.
It doesn't have to, and indeed shouldn't, be a single system. We'd rather have a handful of independent news checker orgs, maybe some topic-specific ones. Funding remains an exercise for the reader.
Articles from the likes of Tech Radar or Toms Hardware I would trust to a higher standard than a random tweet, but really I wouldn't label them as "real journalists"
I question the ethics and standards of the New York Times at least a little at this point so it's not like great journalism is common.
Also, there is the effect of a lie oft repeated becoming the truth - the times I've seen small outlets writing nonsense, and having it picked up by progressively bigger papers citing the smaller ones as credible sources is too much to count.
Generally there is a chain of trust in news publishing that goes nowhere and there's nothing we can do about it, as more often than not, someone credible repeats the hearsay nonsense down the line, at which point they count as a primary source.
So much of news publishing I would describe as not even wrong.
People never paid for news really. If you're thinking of the days when you had to pay 25 cents for a newspaper at the convenience store, that didn't come even close to the cost of running a newspaper in those days. Your quarter only covered (maybe) the cost of the paper and printing it. These days, we don't need paper, and running a web service is probably cheaper per-reader than physical paper.
Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, just as they do now.
I don't trust any kind of generalization like this, which only serves further disinformation and misinformation.
There are bad journalists (if they can be called journalists at all) and good journalists. At this point in history, our only hope lies with diligent reporters from reputable publishers.
It's kind of depressing to think that we have had this world-spanning system of knowledge and "hyperlinks" for decades now, individual pieces that should've enabled an easy chain of attribution/citation...
Wikipedia sources an article from a semi-legit source. That semi-legit source either just says "sources" or points to something less-legit, like a Tweet.
You can bring new "facts" into existence by just laundering them from lower- and lower-quality sources.
Not a tweet from Southwest, mind you. Not even a tweet from someone who says that they used to work for Southwest. Just... a tweet.