> Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?

Static text is much cheaper than dynamic content. News isn't anything that couldn't be served out of a .txt or sqlite CMS.

News providers seem wholly uninterested in providing anything better and actually competing with better content providers

Assuming the content is $0

> Are you saying that serving ads costs more than running a news site?

Serving the ads is probably much more expensive than serving the news site, since there is a ton of heavy algorithms to determine what ads to show.

Total costs for each depends on how much it costed to make the news article so is hard to say.