The death of mainstream media?

The Eugene Weekly this week ran a blurb about UO School of Journalism Dean Tim Gleason's cry for help for dying newspapers around the state and country. Apparently, he spoke on the subject at a recent City Club meeting. Someone then questioned him about the need to actually support the advertising-driven, PR-clogged mainstream media. The statistic that 75% of news stories come from press releases was mentioned. Gleason made some indignant response about the public benefitting from the close ties between public relations (ie advertisers) and newspapers, they just don't realize it. The Weekly's position was, well, if nobody wants to read that drivel any more, why should anybody pay reporters to produce it?
A logical argument. But I've been writing a lot of those "My Goals in Journalism" essays lately, part of several journalism internship applications (yes, it seems I'm addicted to the temporal, cold-water-plunge thrill of intern gigs), and I have a few cents to contribute to this discussion.
Yes, the state of mainstream media in this country is pretty sorry. Even a person who hasn't spent the past four years scrutinizing media outlets will probably admit that a lot of the stories we see on television and in magazines and newspapers are shallow, blatantly pro-[insert disliked industry here], and generally useless. In the meantime, we have security camera footage of the Airbus crashing into the Hudson, and anyone with a blog and access to a computer can have a readership. (Hi, readership! Thanks for supporting this 100% PR-free blog!). And this is just the beginning - once every grandma has a video phone, we'll all be silmultaneous consumers and producers of media content. So, you may ask, why keep journalists around?
Well, hate to say it, but a lot of us are better at it than you. Grandma might have seen Mrs. Plum get murdered with the brass candlestick in the drawing room, but she probably doesn't know how to scour the microfilm at the library to get Mrs. Plum's complete criminal history and shed more light on the situation. I'm talking about the good reporting that does still happen, the other 25% (and shrinking) of stories. Yes, it may be more efficient to have a whole army of citizen reporters working through online media providers, providing egalatarian, user-picked content, but that doesn't make it better. As the Weekly pointed out, "The most popular, widely read article online of any newspaper in the Northwest in recent years was a story about a man who died after having sex with a horse." Sometimes, the newspaper's primary purpose isn't to give readers the content they want to see but the content they need to see.
Not to say that the current state of affairs doesn't need fixing - a lot of fixing. If people aren't reading those important stories, it's probably a sign that the storytelling has not been adequate. And this whole selling out thing needs to end, somehow. I, for one, feel that the integrity of my Journalism degree (which I will recieve, godwilling, this June) has been compromised by the fact that I share it with Public Relations and Advertising students coming out of the same school. Not that these fields are not legitimate and can't be put to good use (check out greenwashingindex.com). It's just that, in most professional applications, they stand for everything news reporters should stand against. Twisting of the facts for profit. Hiding other certain facts to make your employer look better. When you think about it, these degree programs should be placed as far away as possible from the true Journalism programs. Like, in the business school.