Journalism management
In his book Flat Earth News, the British journalist Nick Davies explains that 80% of the stories in Britain's quality press wouldn’t be original and that only 12% of stories would be generated by reporters.
This fact is due to a phenomenon called “Churnalism”, that is to say a form of journalism in which pre-packaged material such as press releases or wire stories are used to create articles instead of publishing articles based on bake-off reporters’ work.
It goes without saying that the easier the information is to find, the more profitable it is. Thus, we can emphasis the role of economy and/or speed in degrading the quality of modern journalism as they encourage several newspapers to create fake stories. This problem is all the more dangerous so it is a kind of vicious circle: once these stories are published, numerous other publications across the world picked up and recycled them, without having their truthfulness recognized.
How might it change?
Traditional newspapers have strong difficulties as their selling and advertising revenues have been declining from the competition with other media such as television and the internet.
They no longer have sufficient middles to generate news stories by allocating reporters to find them. Thus, local newspapers and trade magazines are commonly produced by only one or two staff and these rely upon stories which are increasingly brought to them by representatives.
At the end of the day, journalism is more and more compromise as there is a lack of middles to finance this activity and a lake of target able to judge it to the right