The publications you cite were studied not long before the dot bomb of 00/01 and found to comprise over 50 percent by word count copies and rework of Reuters, and Associated Press wires. I founded a agency early in the 90s which began with a specialism in corporate information systems public relations and I still haven't gotten over the first time we read our release for a client printed verbatim in a national daily.

I can't vouch for other generations, but the agency world I grew up in was occupied by a genuinely terrific cohort of individuals who had always wanted to be journalists and authors, but the mainstream media was locked up with heirs and scions and favourite nephews of families more frequently who first made a successful career in the 50s when social mobility was last a thing, and so the readability if not always examined quality of the typical press release was written to a very high standard, This poses the question of whether there was a improvement in the values of mainstream reporting on specialist subjects, because despite relying on the agencies to spoon feed them copy, news and general media were getting that copy from writers who were immediately adjacent to the sources and who were by virtue of being suppressed from pursuing "real" journalism careers, bent on proving their worth. I grew up reading media of the previous generation and felt that everyone lost something special by the middle of the 1980s. I also think that what I just related kept the standard of computing reporting from crashing. I am not certain my impression be it as it may be based on my professional dedication to and reliance on the insights I could discover at the time. But I am in any doubt that computing journalism crashed in the beginning of the new century and whatever happened to the blogging movement of computing journalism is something more complicated than I can surmise reliably right now. I remember too clearly visiting my local news stand for the latest copy of Byte (I felt able to take a private stand supporting the retail distribution in those years and was ahead of myself wanting to avoid my reading being analysed? When I found that I had bought my last copy of Byte the previous month. To even think of a substitute for the range of coverage as Byte you'd need to begin with Microprocessor Report and end up spending several thousand bucks for not even getting close. What you're doing as well, when you trade up or down the coverage breadth versus density spectrum of individual titles, is very important to think about in depth that I've never seen captured in surveys or circulation audits or even any attempt at so doing. The obvious question about how well you can balance breadth and depth and frequency of reporting rapidly differentiates into very non linear equations that only rarely don't lose their propensity for being possible for any outside observer to understand, because of filters of demographics, physical distance distribution costs that distributors like COMAG realized offer up margins when gamed (back pressure on publishers selling prices that can have a significant dollar cost in geography dependent advertising revenues) and the lumpiness of circulation versus "reach" which is basically how many people read any given copy, which gets skewed by density such as in Silicon Valley and is inextricably connected with big ticket display advertising deals. My business is reversing public information for traders to ascertain better bargain prices for their advertising buying., although I spend a lot more time recently working with music production which originally was a offshoot of making spots for clients who hadn't time for working up the necessary relationship with a purely creative shop.

Given the competing needs of the balances above are all well solved if you can pick and choose your publishing schedule in other words invest more time ceteris psribus and your results improve in journalism often exponentially, trauma triage of scandal reporting is a decidedly less clear method of analysis. Compare with The Financial Times breaking a corporate scandal at their own behest and to their timetable and recognising that when you break big news you put your reputation on the line, and the problems with the original question of whether or not the media are any good at handling stories of major scandals let alone the FTX madness which is still moving faster than the incredulity of the majority of readers and editors both alike, and you have received where I am going to retire for the night with a good malt whisky. Not least because the questions that are being raised are precisely the ones that I wanted to know why nobody was raising them four decades ago and some before my time I'm sure as well.