I think your opinion on sports journalism as a profession tends to depend on the sort of content you like to consume.
If your only experience to it is via transfer speculation, news and attack pieces on manager/player futures then you're likely to have a fairly low opinion of the profession. If you like to read op-eds, historical accounts, tactical analysis or in-depth public interest pieces then you'll develop more respect for the journalists that painstakingly research, prepare and produce it.
It's a broad church so I find some of what I can best describe as hatred / utter dismissal of the profession as a little reductive to say the least.
In terms of this development, it's indicative of a wider trend and whilst it's something I expected and understand, it isn't something I'm personally very happy with.
The idea that tech VF (who will throw money at any white elephant that has a decent pitch and strokes their ego) is the only way that good sports journalism is sustainable is a sad indictment.
As newspapers see their audience dwindle and become more and more reliant on ad revenue than actual sales, clicks are the name of the game. Why pay a writer who meticulously conducts research, interviews and fact checking to produce one article every couple of weeks when it gets less clicks than the intern paid a fraction of that who can churn out ten listicles and empty transfer nonsense every day?
We've seen the effect of this on journalism as a whole in the gutting of some of the most talented and respected journalists and the scaling down of most 'old' news outlets.
If a subscription model is the future for well researched and written content on sport, then so be it. It's just a shame as to me this basically ends the idea that they could coexist peacefully - i.e. we're not far from seeing a total divide between outlets that do lowest common denominator stuff for clicks and those that charge a subscription for higher brow content.
Like another poster already said, the net effect of this is that fewer and fewer people get to read the latter, particularly people without the resources and inkling to pay (poor people, young people, communities where the idea to subscribing to a high-brow journal isn't considered). That then results in the next generation of journalists coming from an even smaller pool of society and the content they write being from an even smaller grounding.
It's not the end of the world, but it's a worrying (if perhaps inevitable) move in sports journalism.