Quality VS Quantity VS Keyword Targeting - What's the best approach?

So, here's the current problem that I'm running into. I run a website that's the equivalent of a news website, so content is limitless, yet somewhat limited. Quantity of news to report on is not the problem. The problem is that not every single post can be a 500 word masterpiece. However, I do not ever post anything on the site less than 300 words, but even 300 words can be a struggle to reach sometimes.

So, here's my question.... I'm wondering which is more important and which do you think I would see more success with.

Quality Posts

I could do 1 quality post everyday that's somewhat unique and 1k+ words with images. However, since these posts take longer, I wouldn't be able to churn out as many news-type posts. Right now, I do 10x news posts/day @ minimum 300 words. This number would probably be cut in half if I did a quality post every day.

Quantity Posts

If I'm not doing a quality post/day, I could churn out 10x 300 word posts every day. If I did a quality post every day, I could probably do 1x quality post + 5x quantity posts.

Keyword Tageting

Now, I told you that I run a news website. I'm one of a thousand and I know that. In other words, I have a lot of competition and it's hard to place in the SERPs. Therefore, it wouldn't be a horrible idea to try and cover some topics that aren't necessarily newsworthy, but the topics would be 300 words and keywords would be targeted in the posts. Basically, people that visit the site regularly for the most up-to-date news may not view these topics, but I could get search engine hits for them.

I'm just trying to figure out a good combination/gameplan and stick with it. It's a guessing game and it's been driving me bonkers.

What would you say would be the best route to take? All help is appreciated!

I can clearly relate to this as I have once written for news site through freelance work and it's really hard to elaborate on a news with very limited info and source hence struggling to even reach 300 words.

Personally, if you can go over a news item deeply through acquiring info from various sources, then quality posts is a way to go. Perhaps you can pick news items which has sufficient info available online. I wrote before for 3D printing news site and I always pick news that I can elaborate to make content more engaging whilst having various sources online for some critical points that's needed to be included. Of course that topic of news I had written was quite interesting because 3d printing presents cool awesome hi-tech products but because I was covering enough info in a creative way, I can see that some news sites was also linking to my post. That's really cool as I get free backlinks from related site as well as free traffic. Basically it is justified because as an old adage goes (old but gold), content is king - create trending content and backlinks will come for free.

Otherwise, if your topic coverage may just seem too hard to elaborate and has very limited info available, then I think you should go for keyword-targeted rather than prioritizing the quantity.

So for me, this is the precedence: Quality > Keyword-targeted > Quantity. But of course this is my take and everything is up to you.

I say quality over quantity. As long as the quality is good, there should be a lot of repeat readers to your website.

If the main goal is to place high in the SERP, I would recommend choosing a different niche other than news, but that is totally up to you. I have found that it is more beneficial to me to work on less competition keywords, since they are easier to rank for. The money is in the high rankings anyways.

I say dig into your webmasters tool and look at the search terms that got more CTR then write about those terms more often.

Google has different algos for different industries. eg Movies, Tech, Health. So, maintain a nice balance and take a look at what content top anked sites are deploying on their sites. Use that style.