"Journalism" isn't a real profession anymore. It doesn't attract writing talent, except at the margins. Why should it, journalism jobs have decreased by more than ~50% the last decade.
Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.
Journalism is expensive, so what I think may be happening is that the newspapers are no longer able to afford to fill an entire paper with the writings of actual journalists. Instead they hire "writers" and "translators" who take junk from the internet and notices from news agencies and turn it into sort of articles.
Danish newspapers are filled with bad spelling and broken language. It's pretty clear that they're hiring people to translate or piece together articles.
The real investigating articles are still well written, but there aren't enough of those to fill the paper or update the website multiple times a day.
Newspapers used to be great for local news. But now with layoffs they barely cover the usual local beats. They fill lots of space with "local" news that is actually written off in some corporate center by a few people that do a few minutes of googling. https://newrepublic.com/article/160534/desperate-last-days-l...
You can’t actually get local news anymore. There was a fire at a nursing home just a few km from my house. Only “reporting” available the next day was via a Facebook group for the local area. The papers that are small enough to cover it no longer exists and it not worth covering in the larger papers.
True, that sort of hyper-local stuff is virtually non-existent. Some cities have a paper that puts out neighborhood editions. Mine recently ran a series of stories about how the neighborhood association got audited and was found to be in terrible financial condition, so the city terminated their grants.
It's true for core of reporting. Being able to write clearly and accurately is important, but if the reporter isn't able to actually do the legwork of actual reporting, the result is clearly-written but empty of information. Being able to re-write a press release from the mayor's office isn't journalism.
Journalists are now just copywriters; optimizing for SEO and Google's spiders.