They are in a bed of their own making.

They made the news a commodity because it lowered their costs and raised their profit margins. They trained readers to be shallow and emotional, to skim for the high level details and ignore deeper analysis, to be easily swayed by cheap "human interest" reporting. They sold themselves out to national chains and ignored the interests of their community.

And now we are supposed to feel sorry for them?

Newspapers have always been sort of a sham. Propped up by the fact that for centuries it was an enormous challenge just to get any sort of information from beyond the horizon, let alone accurate or timely information. The bar has always been low, and it has always been easiest to skate by on doing little more than repeating what someone else has said but putting it in a nice little easily consumed package (length, writing style, format, etc.) But the barriers to information dissemination have fallen, fast and decisively. And now all of the access, publishing infrastructure, and tricks of the trade that kept the newspapers rich in the past are useless.

In the end it's not a bad thing. There has always been a very profound and wide reaching problem in that journalists have as a rule, and especially toward the last half of the 20th century, been trained in that abstract subject of "journalism". A reporter is a journalist first and then has some specialty as a minor side note to their core competency of generic journalism. The big problem with that is that journalism is not actually that hard. But elevating it to such a high level diminished the importance of "secondary" knowledge in a reporter, such as expertise in the subject they are covering. We've all been witness to the problems this creates. The "science" reporter can barely understand the subject their covering and they routinely make errors which significantly damage the quality of their reporting. That problem has been endemic to journalism for decades.

Journalists who know a lot about the business, how to format a story, how to write a hook to get people interested, but who are as ignorant of the subject matter as a high school sophomore tasked to do a surprise report on a country they've never heard of. Yes there have been exceptions, in rare cases there have been reporters who were experts or who had a strong knowledge of the material they covered, but outside of sports reporting this has always been the exception. Because the difficulty of getting the story out to people in a format that was accessible was primary.

The value of the specialty skill of "journalism" is far, far less important today due to modern communications technology, making the very significant and real short-comings of traditional journalism all the more glaring.

Sorry reporters but I think your days are ultimately numbered. The ideal future I see is one where experts learn how to communicate, not where communicators learn how to fake looking like experts. If you want to be a part of that future I suggest going back to school or otherwise spending a lot of time becoming an expert on something important other than how to arrange letters into a 2 inch wide column.

P.S. Another enormous problem is that the media has become part of the establishment, and has blatantly fallen down on its job to challenge the establishment and report on the key issues of the day instead of merely serving up infotainment and pablum.