Well, I think you could enhance the tax credit for buying a subscription, or you could make it purely tax-deductible in the same way you would make a charitable donation tax-deductible.
Say you gave each family, each household, 1,000 dollars' worth of tax credits per year that they could spend on subscriptions. They could spend it on a subscription to Le Devoir, La Presse, The Globe and Mail or whatever they chose. You subsidize their consumption of the news. There's money going to the consumer to choose, money that, again, flows through to the publishers, because they get the money from the subscription. However, there is no association, then, between government and the publisher. It's an arrangement between the government and the consumer. It's there to promote for the government, if the government wishes, the public good of having a well-informed public, but it's agnostic in terms of where they spend it. If it's a qualified Canadian journalism organization, I suggested a different way to do that.
This way, people are free to consume the news that they want, and government can subsidize the behaviour that it wants without putting the publishers in a conflict of interest.