So much of "the news" is a repetition of what influential people said on Twitter. This is a much easier way to create content than, say, digging through files to spot corruption, or interviewing people to talk about false criminal convictions. It seems like both (a) there are very few real journalists anymore, and (b) journalists have no other way to create content economically enough to be paid for by clickbait wages other than to just report what people said on Twitter.
Outside of the top handful of best-resourced papers, a whole lot of what passes for "investigative journalism" is really 23 year olds doing drive-by hit pieces of public figures and offices with evidence from searchable public records scaffolded onto existing narratives often gleaned from social media.
My wife is in the sort of work where there's a reporter assigned, at least in part, to write stories about what she and her colleagues are doing. In her 12 years in her current role, there have been four or five reporters covering their beat. She has never met a single one, or even seen one to her knowledge, in spite of the vast majority of her office's work being done in open settings during normal business hours.
What appears to happen is that a controversy pops up, and their reporter will go back through public records over the past 3, 5, 10 years with keyword searches. Then whatever they turn up gets cobbled onto the existing narrative of controversy to show that some major problem exists. Then they pull a quote from some friendly c-list source advancing their theory of a problem/corruption/conspiracy,
don't interview the subjects of the story, and the "investigation" is all buttoned up and gets rolled out as a series over multiple Sundays. My wife's office will then never hear the name of that reporter again. A year or two later some new grad gets assigned to their beat to do the same thing.
What's happening isn't the boring work of sitting outside committee meeting rooms, cultivating sources, figuring out the institutional quirks, or any of that antiquated reporting skill. Instead, it's trying to dig up the most sensational dirt possible in the least amount of time in order to punch your ticket out of this regional city and onto the staff of a national publication before you turn 25.
The character of news has fundamentally changed in that it's not really contextualized observation, but decontextualized searching for evidence for existing narratives that will sell both the paper and yourself.
