I think there are several parts to the cause, there's the issue that 'professional' journalists often act like their job is sacred and their credentials make them superior to 'indie' journalists and other 'commoner' scum despite the current standards being even lower than what it'd take for someone without a CS degree to write code. We see this alot in relation to the discourse around misinformation or reporting on violent events on sanitized platforms like YouTube. This makes people question why they should bother paying for the opinion of someone who looks down on them.

Then there's the other issue that we see even scientists frequently make mistakes interpreting data despite having a far more rigorous education and far more experience interpreting data and risking significant professional consequences if caught. But journalists have none of that, they don't have to actually understand what they're trying to report on, they don't have to interpret the data in good faith and they don't really face any consequences for being wrong. A scientist might end up having to retract a paper if it's wrong, a journalist doesn't even necessarily have to add a correction.

This also leads into an additional issue about journalists who specialize in certain things. Like, say, games journalists, tech journalists, aerospace journalists, medical journalists etc. Often they don't have any expertise in the field they're reporting on, it's so common for:

- tech journalists to report obviously incorrect interpretations of basic technical matters

- game journalists to be completely out of touch with gaming

- aerospace journalists to report information that makes it obvious they don't know/care about the accuracy of what they're saying (there's an example from just a few days ago, of a journalist latching onto one typo of a number reported correctly in several other parts of the report for a hit piece, refusing to issue a proper correction despite being publicly called out by the company they targeted)

- medical journalists to report research results without understanding the caveats or confidence levels of the study (eg the jumping back and forth on how coffee can provide X health benefit)

- tv/movie journalists to have opinions that are more often than not completely opposite to those of the public, complete with looking down on the public disdainfully for the disagreement rather than updating their reporting style to at least also fairly cover public sentiment

These are topics people tend to be passionate about and thus are more likely to spot issues, which reduces trust in journalism as a whole. After all, if the reporting on a topic they follow in depth is so bad, how bad might the reporting on topics they don't know as much about be?

To me, the solution would be to make professional journalism actually require skills and that they also need to have some humility. Like, a tech journalist should be someone who has had decent experience in the tech field, such that they understand the technology they're covering.