Everyone's dancing around the problem. People refuse to pay the cost of producing high quality news. Advertising doesn't come close to cutting it.

You can see a new generation of media that charge subscribers enough to make a modest profit, and it's things like Talking Points Memo ($70 base cost per year), Defector ($70 or $80 I think), The Information ($500), 404 ($100), etc.

ArsTechnica has had subscriber tiers for quite a while. I am one. I’m not sure how many people subscribe or what their numbers look like, but I’d hope that Ars will be able to still be able to keep going in whatever the new media market looks like.

Josh at TPM has actually been quite open/vocal about how to run a successful (mildly profitable) media site in the current market. I think we are seeing transitions towards more subscriber based sites (more like the magazine model, now that I think about it). See The Verge as a more recent example.