> What is the difference between "newsworthy" and "clickbait"
Good question. It's important to know that "reliable" sources can push clickbait, and the headline and framing contributes to turning an ordinary story into clickbait. For example, in a science context, reporting on new research findings about aging can be kind of dry, but give that same research to a content farm and it could turn into "Scientists Find Weird Diet That STOPS AGING"
> now just read like a curated version of Twitter
That's a problem, and there are whole "news" outlets dedicated to grabbing a few tweets, writing some words around it, and calling it a story. That said, there is still a great deal of deep-dive long form journalism out there, but guess what: It doesn't show up as well in SEO, and isn't promoted by Meta/Google/Twitter, so of course the stuff that tends towards clickbait and social media summaries is going to easy to find.
Often the major media at the national/international level becomes a conversation with itself and with the in-group journalists doing the reporting. My theory about why more media haven't dropped twitter is because they are wedded it as the medium for which that instant conversation happens.
Newspapers, for example, used to have a Copy Desk, where the final editing and composing of the paper happened. Within the computers system where reporters filed stories and editors gathered and refined them for publication, most newsrooms had a file or section for internal talk and discussion. Think of it like an internal Slack channel, except it wasn't instant. I happened to have worked at a newspaper at one point, as a programmer, and the stuff that lived in that system was wild, especially when big breaking news happened. Now, I believe, Twitter plays that role, but across organizations.