Paying for journalism is sometimes framed purely as a personal consumer choice, buying access to content, but it functions as something closer to civic infrastructure, since a well-resourced newsroom is what allows genuine investigation and accountability reporting to happen at all in the first place.
Free content funded entirely by advertising tends to favour whatever generates the most clicks rather than what is most important, since advertising revenue depends on volume of attention rather than on depth or accuracy, which creates a persistent pressure toward the sensational over the substantive.
A subscription, even a modest one, helps fund the slower, more expensive kind of reporting, investigations, long-term coverage, that rarely attracts enough advertising on its own to be commercially viable, which makes paying for journalism a small but genuine act of support for the accountability a community depends on. The effect tends to be cumulative, adding up steadily rather than appearing all at once.