Self important bloggers willing to talk for free have killed professional journalists, you know the ones that get paid, meet deadlines, and can get good sources quickly.
The only time I've seen professional journalists is in niche trade magazines. Yes, the quality is still often low, but they have to be minimally competent as they're serving a specific audience that likely knows what the article is talking about. If you're writing about geek stuff for a geek magazine, you're not going to make it far with FUD, some careless unsupported assertions and plenty of fluff. Same for an HR magazine, an aviation magazine, etc.
Notice I didn't say much about "ethics". My company buys an ad, full sized and color, in virtually all aviation magazines. Consequently, no aviation magazines tend to say bad things about our company. Is this unethical? Apparently not, as it follows all laws and industry best practices as well as vetted by many talented lawyers. It is still very clear. If a magazine or other print media unfairly bad mouthed our company, we'd obviously be reluctant to spend our limited advertising budget on them as clearly they do not do enough fact checking to do accurate reporting. Same goes for sourcing.
I happen to know for a fact that a very large segment of the media industry is rigged this way. Sometimes with advertising dollars, sometimes with "access", sometimes with junkets, sometimes with aligning reality to fit the ideology of your magazine/newspaper, etc.
I'm not sure being paid is the definition of a professional journalist. Plenty of bloggers have ads. I'm not sure being accurate is the definition of a professional journalist, as most paid journalists are not.
Disclaimer: accuracy opinion strictly limited to traditional news articles where I knew something about the matter in question. Exactly 0% were entirely accurate, roughly 50% were somewhat or fairly close and roughly 50% were "WTF?" level of inaccuracy. etc, etc.
