It seems like if you're interested in making money online with advertising with "journalism" there's strong pressure to turn yourself into BuzzFeed.... that is, low effort, cheap tricks, information pornography.
No, I am genuinely interested in how to fund real journalism. How do we go about getting money for people to expose the aggregation of wealth and power against the interests of the plebeians. (note: plebeians is used here not as a derogatory)
To fund real journalism for the filthy peasants you need to seek public and private funding for an endowment (not direct operational funding) combined with a small amount of tasteful advertising and merchandising, subscription fees, and a policy of graduating content to public domain after a certain short period (a few months and not much more).
Merchandising could be prints of artwork, cartoons, expanded versions of articles or source materials as well as branded things like coffee mugs.
The key is being lean to start and developing an endowment so you don't always have to be seeking dollars (NPR fund drives bad). Offer high value, medium to high priced merchandise, keep your journalistic standards high with a low supply of advertising (keeping demand high).
Endowment contributors will be motivated by a history of quality journalism and the fact that you open your content to the public after a certain reasonably short time. If you give people a way to buy it without abusing DRM or being otherwise obnoxious, people will pay.
I'm not sure most of the people exposing the aggregation of wealth and power against the interests of the plebeians are doing it for the money and would probably do it even if unpaid. Though for what it's worth the main guy I read doing that, Krugman, get's paid pretty well by the NYT which makes money from subscriptions which works because some people are willing to pay.
For anyone unfamiliar with Krugman here's an example:
