Our unwillingness to pay for journalism is what wiped it out.
People, in aggregate, appear to want to read "news stories" with little discrimination about the quality or accuracy of those stories. When consumers want a product without care for quality, the market optimizes for that. So you get free news that's worth what you paid for it.
Journalism as passionate advocacy for things actually believed in is far older than journalism as a product. Paying more for a journalism "product" doesn't magically make it not propaganda. I'd say the opposite happens - that journalism as product incentivizes outlets to pander to the audience to increase circulation, without regard to the truthfulness of the content. High-"quality" commercial journalism is clickbait, because what's rewarded is circulation. not degree of accuracy.
The problem is that journalism product crowds out (and delegitimatizes, intentionally, as competition) honest advocacy.
No it isn't. Lots of people are willing to pay for journalism, but it's a major pain to do it. That's the problem syndication was supposed to solve, but large media companies (apparently) made the decision to kill off RSS.
It's not any harder to pay for journalism than it is any other product online. I have subscriptions to a couple of newspapers I respect and getting those set up was no harder than buying a hoodie from a web store.
Perhaps. I should clarify that by "wiped out", I mean that many formerly reputable and workmanlike publications abandoned the basic principles of journalism (e.g., the five W's, separation of church and state, etc.).
Right. The reason they abandoned them was economics. They were no longer making enough money to pay for fact checkers, copy-editors, and investigative journalists. They were forced to focus on clickbait articles because those were the only ones that generated enough traffic to pay for the ads to keep the business afloat.
