I think I got that idea from Movies/TV as a kid in the 80s/90s. It was a very common and prominent theme. The hero(ine) was very often a print journalist. Think e.g. Teri Hatcher's Lois Lane in the 90s.
And don't mention that one co-worker is living an adopted second persona to seduce and/or spy on a fellow reporter. Also, his immigration status and all the forms he must have faked to get his job and file his taxes. If Clark Kent was real he would almost certainly be locked up somewhere.
Worse by conventional journalistic standards. But since the 60s we've had "New Journalism" and so-called "Gonzo Journalism", were the journalist meddles with their subject, and even reports on himself...
Yellow journalism was the norm in the past. We lived through a unique and fairly amazing era.
But when I was a student in communication you learn really quickly that it has seldom been like that over the last 160 years. Sex, Blood and Sport sell (and Scandals). This is the three S rules.
Early french newspaper from the industrial revolution (circa. 1860, Paris) were already promoting and enforcing short and concise sentences. And a populist and demagogic style to sell more.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Petit_Journal_(newspaper)#D... and others.
I like the idea that there is some hard-nosed blue collar people out there trying to speak truth to power but it seems that they speak for power because it pays.
A few owners sadly own large parts of the media and push an agenda, but I really do not want to imagine a world where newspapers don't exist anymore. They are not perfect and its easy to criticise articles after the fact, but its incredibly difficult to pump out timely and relevant news.
There often is no single truth but rather many perspectives and I don't think we can expect a journalist paid a barely livable wage and working long hours to keep up the highest quality standards every day all day.
Please have some respect for the role this media plays, holding authority to account and getting by and large useful and correct information to the public. That doesn't mean you need to trust every written word, but comments like yours that newspapers are not/don't try most of the time to be honest and fair is simply not correct or fair.
As you said, a few owners control virtually all of corporate media. And those owners are not unbiased. And those owners and the people they hire in management have agendas. And that trickles all the way down to the newsroom floor, just like it does in any company.
At any rate, journalism needs a business model revamp for the 21st century. Substack is part of the answer, but other things need to be tried too.