I think what you are wrestling with is the fact that content has been devalued. A couple of examples:
It used to be that, if you wanted an opinion on a show, you had the choice of a few newspapers and magazines. Now you have ATC and a bunch of other sites, blogs etc. (And I am not talking about the official reviewers on those sites, though I am not sure it affects the argument at all.) You can get damn good scholarship from ATC and other sites and blogs (mixed with absolute garbage, of course). People used to get to know critics so they could assess how they generally were or were not a good barometer. Don't you do the same thing here or on HuffPost or anywhere else? As I have written before, there is WAY more being written about the theatre now than at any time in modern history.
The same thing applies to the reporting side. At one time, you needed the paper or TV to you what was going on in the world. Today, you don't because there are always people "reporting" on events around the world, pretty much in real time. So the value of having reporters on the ground (except perhaps in a war zone) is pretty low. Media that used to have outposts around the world don't any more. Why pay a stringer to report on a riot somewhere when everyone already knows all about it?
There are, of course, a few organizations still fighting the good fight, the Times perhaps more than any other. But it is a battle of diminishing returns.
What has value now is being able to organize and/or analyze content in a way people find useful. There are some people who write so elegantly that their words still have value (just as there are some actors whose work has value while most sadly do not). And when those characteristics surface and enough people respond, that creates value. But the reason that facebook has so much value is because there is more discussion and debate going on there at any given moment than at any time in recorded history. And when you add in twitter, reddit, etc., it is awe inspiring.
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