but if you think you can't afford access to any news outlet, I don't think you're trying hard enough.

Well, I can neither do magic, nor work, so I'm not sure what you're expecting me to do. lol My budget is state limited, so I have to prioritize where I spent it. And considering that it doesn't suffice front and center, I simply cannot pay 15 bucks or whatever for some sort of subscription, especially not for just one single website. Nowadays everyone asks for their 15 bucks of service fee and if I had to pay for each and every single one of them I'd have to pay more than what my monthly budget looks like.

I don't have a solution for the capitalist issue, but selling user data is surely not it. Generally, I think news should be freely accessible to everyone, as it is a core foundation of our democracies. Some countries have state or public funded papers, but not all of them and most people are not linking to those exclusively, assuming they even cover a given topic.