I think that supporting a wide spread of newspaper on the local level will alleviate all these issues in aggregate. This is what we do in Norway and I think it works quite well to be honest. My municipality of around 250k inhabitants has 4 newspapers that I am aware of, none of which feels very overtly influenced by activists nor political or financial pressures.

There are quite a few newspapers who are political and receive subsidies, but overall I think our system works quite well at providing high quality local reporting at affordable prices.