NPR is not free; it's paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And "not for profit" is not the same as "no cost to the consumer." In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).
obviously nothing is literally “free”, that’s a trivial point to make. operational funds have to come for somewhere. The point was there's no additional cost to the reader (that they aren't already paying for) to get news from those sources and they don't depend on ad revenue or data monetization to make a profit.
What I’ve noticed that happened in Brazil is that most major news channels have 2 websites: a subscription one with quality articles and a free one with very summarized AI lazily written news with no details or context.
There’s really not much to it, quality content needs money and ads don’t pay off for all of it (besides the fact nowadays people just blocks them).