I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but the fact is that all media are in trouble, particularly print, and the trouble crosses ideological lines. Even conservative newspapers like the Washington Times are having serious financial difficulties and laying off many reporters.
The advertiser-supported print media model that has operated since the early-to-mid-1800s clearly isn't working, and as readers migrate to the internet, nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money to support the kind of newsgathering staffs needed to run a major metro newspaper.
Here's the comment I posted on a newspaper trade group discussion board responding to a young journalism student wondering how to get a job in the current environment. I think it shows some of the problems inherent in technology shifts.
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If (NAME DELETED) is still reading, she's seen from the variety of advice that journalism is in chaos, the old road maps often lead people into dead ends, and nobody has yet figured out whether the new roads now opening are going to end with driving off cliffs, landing in swamps or sand traps, or actually get drivers somewhere they want to go.
Michelle, I did read your profile. You're at a well-known journalism school and have prior background at your university's newspaper. I'm assuming you're asking here because you want “real world” advice in addition to what you're already getting from professors.
The old career paths of journalism for the last half-century or so have been either:
1) go to J-school, write for the school newspaper, do internships, and use your clips to get your first job at a small newspaper in a big chain so you could get promoted to a larger newspaper, often in the same chain, or
2) for mid-career people, leverage in-depth knowledge of your current career into a specialist beat position by learning how to write and demonstrating your ability to write, either with freelance work or with a masters degree from a J-school, or
3) for people at both early and mid-career stages, get freelance jobs at a local newspaper unrelated to your current employment and try to convince an editor to turn your part-time or free work into a full-time job.
As those three options (and some comments above) show, lots of reporters learned technical skills of how to write but didn't know their communities or their subjects very well. People moved from small newspapers to large newspapers and typically didn't develop in-depth knowledge of their communities. The result has been that people who were subject matter experts in certain fields, or who knew their communities very well, could provide an asset to an editor that someone with a traditional journalism school education quite often could not.
Go back to your journalism history to see how newspapers looked in the days of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, etc... it was anything but the professional model we've seen starting to develop in the early 1900s which became dominant in the post-WW2 era.
Except for the very oldest reporters living today, we've grown up in an environment where economics of scale had pretty much driven competition out of the print media and made it financially impossible to start a brand-new newspaper in a major city without massive infusion of capital. I can't think of any papers except the Washington Times and USA Today in the last four decades where that happened successfully, and though there may be some others, I trust it's obvious that economics allowed large newspapers and large newspaper chains to create standards of professional practices, education, and training for journalists which, while certainly not mandatory, became a general model for metro newspapers and have been at least a goal for smaller newspapers.
Most of that has radically changed in the last decade. The same economics of scale which once made large newspapers impossible to compete against are now driving those large newspapers out of business, and making it quite realistic for startup operations to effectively compete against traditional newsgathering operations. Something like Politico or Huffington Post or local media like the St. Louis Beacon would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. While those are professional operations, literally anyone with no training can start writing and try to get an audience, and in some cases may succeed.
Where does that leave us? I don't think any of us know for sure. What I do know is that many of the old rules simply don't work anymore, and you need to know up front that you're going into a line of work with no safe road maps.
That can be exciting or it can be scary. Either way, it's not for the naive or the fainthearted. Make sure you know what you're doing before you start, and be prepared to take risks.
I appreciate your reply. Whatever may come in the wake of the traditional media has to be better. I foresee legions of smaller reporting entities, much as described in the times of Pulitzer and Hearst. I think this is a good thing.
Over the past many decades as media consolidation took place there grew an arrogant based corrupt desire to push news. To influence rather than merely report. The MSM is now a collusive collection of corruption that actively seeks to tilt the axis of truth from its immutable moorings to abject relativism. It is a gift of mercy that this cancer is excised from the host.