Getting grants is an alternative way and it's how freelancers are able to do reporting for cash-strapped newsrooms. Grants definitely have their own can of worms, though. Things like restrictive reporting requirements, do-not-do requirements, and the dynamics that just come from people giving other people relatively large sums of money.
Yeah, the problem with grants is that even with no strings attached there's still a subtle influence where a publication may not want to harm the interests of the source if that grant since they might not provide more funds in the future.
I don't know if it's possible to ever be completely free of outside influence. If anything, I think standards for publishing have become so low that any incentive model that helps keep a majority of facts straight should be the goal. The loss of traditional publishing gatekeepers has just generated a lot of noise and in that noise non-mainstream viewpoints have thrived.
