On the contrary, I am acutely aware of that shift. The deeply-researched, high-investment style of journalism is a high-risk low-reward game these days. Stupid bite-size pieces of low-effort content more reliably convert into advertising dollars, and everyone knows it. Readers have attention spans that require that you grab them within the first half second of a page load, or they're gone. A 12-page expose that took a journalist 8 months of intense investigative work to produce isn't likely to return even that journalist's salary on "dumb" advertising, let alone make any money. As a result, outlets have had to stretch and bend to try to find ways to pay the bills.
I actually think that's why native advertising is a ray of hope for the industry - by allowing advertisers to fund (but critically, not direct) the creation of content up-front, it actually opens up the financial means to produce content that might otherwise be unprofitable. In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary, but media is a low-margin industry already, and the bills have to get paid somehow. If you have better ideas on how to do it, there's a lot of money waiting to be made. :)
> A 12-page expose that took a journalist 8 months of intense investigative work to produce (...)
I think that such content would fare better if it wasn't presented as 12-page expose. It's true, people (myself included) have extremely short attention spans these days (frankly, for good reasons). The content should adapt. I don't say, skip the 11 pages and go for List of 10 Reasons Why This Shocking Revelation Will Mesmerize You. Just drop the story format and make content explorable. I'd love to have a tl;dr of the important points and then an ability to go and explore chains of evidence, and even the full biographies of everyone who talked to the journalist and their dogs.
Yes, media corporations have intense structural pressures. The real customers are wealthy corporations who buy eyeballs; you build articles to appeal to enough of their interests. Otherwise you get replaced by someone who will.
Anyone who's read Bob McChesney or Noam Chomsky on the media should be familiar with the institutional forces you mention.
(It also sounds likely that content written by a given corporation's PR flacks have bad conversion rates. Because their bosses demand it to sound too crude, like some dictator's attempt at propaganda. Professional journalists can make the propaganda more indirect and sweeter-smelling. That's not to disrespect journalists; many of us make our money at least indirectly from advertising.)
I actually think that's why native advertising is a ray of hope for the industry - by allowing advertisers to fund (but critically, not direct) the creation of content up-front, it actually opens up the financial means to produce content that might otherwise be unprofitable. In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary, but media is a low-margin industry already, and the bills have to get paid somehow. If you have better ideas on how to do it, there's a lot of money waiting to be made. :)