Without profitability they cannot survive. The industry as a whole is in decline. People are not as willing to pay for content and ad revenue is not as profitable. But, more importantly, ad revenue also makes what little content is left more susceptible to manipulation vs actually reporting the facts. Compared to how many of these news outlets used to be, many of the local ones today are complete garbage. Lots of poorly written, if it bleeds it leads types of articles etc..

There's a phenomenal article that hits on this point: The Bad News About the News [1] It's by Robert Kaiser, a 50 year veteran editor and reporter of the Washington Post that decided to retire shortly following Bezos' purchase of the company. I hate giving cliff notes of it since it's such a well written piece that should really be consumed as a whole, so don't take this post as cliff notes - but as some related asides.

One important point is that in the past the media had an effective monopoly on information and that basically gave them a never ending faucet of money. The internet has changed all of this. Newspapers, or the media in general today, operate on thin to nonexistent margins. When times are good it's much easier to focus on things like journalistic integrity and quality. In the golden era of the media, monopolized as it was, could enjoy the luxury of having relatively little concern about how their readers would, for instance, react to their reporting. There was no need to pander to fashionable views or condemn unfashionable views. They could write as they saw with their guiding beacon being little more than the story itself.

There's a fine quote in the article from another individual, "By undermining the economic basis of professional reporting and by fragmenting the public, [the digital revolution] has weakened the ability of the press to act as an effective agent of public accountability. If we take seriously the idea that an independent press serves an essential democratic function, its institutional distress may weaken democracy itself. And that is the danger that confronts us."

Now the media is driven to compete against social media, and other media outlets who have 0 concern for anything other than feeding their own buzz. And social media, contrary to promises of uniting society and people, has instead fragmented people into ever more radically divided groups. And this is now reflected in the media as people have hovered to sources that primarily just confirm their own biases and tell them what they want to hear.

One thing I will say as a counter to this all is that, peculiarly enough, even establishments that are supposed to be above monetary concerns have gone downhill. For instance the BBC was at one time the pinnacle of impartial reporting, yet they now are falling into the same trappings of partisanship, bias, and sensationalism that plagues the rest of the media in spite of the fact that (to my knowledge) they have 0 financial mandates. As I check the front page of that site this very moment (with a cleared cache) two of the top 5 displayed headlines are: "A world outraged over crispy chicken" and "How a YouTube beef shook the vegan world.". ...

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...