The education system needs to be radically reformed to teach kids to value reading, knowledge, and learning for its own sake and not just to pass tests and get in to schools that will get them high paying jobs. Critical reading and thinking skills also need to be taught more effectively.
Unfortunately, such reform is difficult to undertake in a society which mostly doesn't value any of that, and when politicians consider critical thinking among their voters to be detrimental to their own interests.
There are a great many people who would like to know the answer to that question but, for the most part, almost no one has. (Almost because there are a few global brands, especially those that provide financial reporting, that are doing OK but most aren't.
There are a lot of reasons, not least of all that the Internet broke the newspaper bundle that forced people advertising in the classifieds for roommates or the local car dealership advertising a sale to effectively subsidize the paper's prestige foreign bureaus and investigative journalism because where else were they going to advertise?
Plus, you don't need a subscription to SI any longer to keep up with whatever is going on in the world of sports.
In my mind, demand for journalism and quality journalism is going to be difficult when folks don’t want or don’t care to read. They have enough things trying to grab their attention that provide an instant gratification — whereas journalism or reading some well researched or written article requires mental effort and investment and almost an appreciation. I personally didn’t appreciate good journalism or writers until I tried writing (mostly technical documents).
I learned two things quickly. Not only did I need to know the subject matter but I needed to convey it in some form that made sense, didn’t just lead to unrelated questions that derail what I’m trying to achieve, and didn’t put the reader to sleep. This is a hard problem, in my opinion.