Let's say we never had "the news", and we all decided we needed to help society understand and react to novel events. Would we invent newspapers and cable channels? I don't think so.
When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing.
The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.
Who is the "we" that is doing the inventing? The News God[1] with the power to correct perverse incentives and keep prisoners from defecting? Doesn't exist. The committee of Folks Who Care About Policy And Represent a Broad Cross-Section of Society but Don't Get into Stupid Arguments? Doesn't exist.
Even if they did, an organization would discover that they could get more views and exert more power using titilatory stories. What you propose is not a stable Nash Equilibrium.
This is a great point, but we also know that institutional, internal information distribution systems, of the kind I mentioned, don't fall prey to that. (They may fall prey to other things -- agreeing with the boss, groupthink, etc.)
Anyway the reason why is because they have different incentives. The question is how to make incentives like that work for society, hopefully while keeping the critical independence of the media. We can't imagine that now, but we have new funding forms like Kickstarter, and Wikipedia is an existence proof for achieving consensus about what claims are well-sourced.
But I think we agree that it's not a great idea to run society on an information system that gets paid every time it stimulates our basest impulses for the lowest possible cost. The endgame of that is Buzzfeed.
I disagree. If you want to get people engaged with the level of unemployment in the country, showing them a chart of unemployment figures are not going to engage them much. Dashboards, charts, etc. are great for engaging people in things they already care about.
Instead, a journalist can contextualise those jobs figures and explain why someone you don't know being out of work can affect your life. Narrative is, and always has been, a method of engaging people.
Never mind the fact that journalists also uncover data themselves. Formalising whistleblowers is all very well, but you still want someone to investigate. Take yesterday's story of a Congressman who claimed more miles in expenses than his car had driven - that was a reporter querying FOIL records to match up the numbers. Two completely different data sets in different governmental bodies. There would be no whistleblower there. Who heads up these information reporting networks, the government? What about government corruption?
What you are describing sounds ideal - but that's exactly what it is, an ideal. Very few real life systems work like that.
Full disclosure, I used to study journalism. I'm being intentionally provocative. I do want us to question the idea that journalistic writing skills are essential to the goals we have, of an informed public that reacts with wisdom to events.
It's like questioning why tech executives have to be adult-supervision MBAs from an Ivy league. Ostensibly the MBA is trained to be a manager of $anything, but a founding engineer might still be a better CEO due to their special understanding and vision. And that MBA is never going to have as much skin in the game - they're in it for what they can get.
Similarly the journalist is allegedly better trained to tell the story of $anything, but maybe we could do more effective work with subject matter experts who pick up the basics of fact-checking, storytelling, and information design. And journalists, unless they are assigned to cover a beat or do a long investigation, rarely have much invested in a story - if something else juicy comes up, they're onto the next thing by tomorrow. And in the Buzzfeed era, that's becoming the next few minutes.
Any time you read a story by a general-purpose journalist on something you know well, there's a familiar pattern. It all is very slick and authoritative-sounding, but is usually hilariously wrong and simple-minded. Consider that this is happening all the time, for the subjects where you aren't an expert. So much for 'writing skills'.
When modern institutions realize they have an information distribution problem, they don't get a bunch of ink-stained, dubiously sober arts graduates with no special qualifications, and tell them to write stories. They pay people to do regularly updated dashboards or reports with charts and graphs, establish information reporting networks and hierarchies, institutionalize whistleblowers, schedule mandatory periodical reviews of how certain projects are going, that sort of thing.
The human element is necessary but journalistic "storytelling" is just a euphemism for titillation or reinforcement of certain narratives. With minor exceptions, I'm not sure it was ever any different.