First, “online journalism and media” is a really broad category. These days, every media outlet is online. Are you asking about the first generation of sites that started life as blogs and morphed into fully staffed media organizations (like the Huffington Post and TechCrunch and Talking Points Memo)? The second generation of VC-funded new media orgs (like Vox and Mic and the Intercept and Vice)? The websites of old-school media orgs (like the New York Times and Atlantic Wire)? Or are you talking about anyone who publishes online? The answers are pretty different.

(Second, there’s a person answering this question — and Quora actually forbids me from naming him, if you can believe that — who boasts about how he successfully lied to the media and fooled a bunch of journalists into printing shit that wasn’t true. And now he fashions himself a media guru. In my line of work he is what’s known as an unreliable source. That’s the nice term for it.)

But I digress. Here are the obvious flaws:

1. The Internet rewards speed over accuracy. As a result, many stories follow the “post first, ask questions later” model.
2. The Internet rewards good SEO over good reporting. So a crappy media site that does nothing but rewrite other peoples’ stories but has figured out how to manipulate Google results gets the traffic (and ad revenue), while the news site that ran the original story absorbs nearly all the cost of producing that content.
3. Editorial decisions are driven by numbers in a way that’s never been seen before. Thank Google Analytics and its ilk for that. So now publishers know exactly how many people click on a headline, and which types of headlines produce more clicks, as well as which stories get more attention from readers.
4. The advertising model is broken. Media sites that dined well on print ads are now attempting to survive on the meager scraps of online ads, which traditionally produce 1/10th the revenue of an equivalent print ad. (And now mobile ads, which are another order of magnitude less profitable, I understand. So it goes $1 print ad => $.10 online ad => $.01 mobile ad.)
5. The broken ad model and analytics conspire to provide a rather strong incentive to a) produce as many stories as possible, b) publish them as quickly as possible, c) tilt coverage toward stories that analytics tell you are more popular, and d) trim your production costs to the bone (ie, reduce staff size, fire high-salaried veteran reporters and replace them with low-paid untrained newbies).
   
   Editors at reputable media orgs — I have been one, at various times in my career, unlike some people answering this question — find this situation untenable, and try to find a compromise between feeding the ad beast and doing actual, valuable reporting. Whether they succeed depends in part on how well funded the media site is, whether it has a tradition of doing real journalism, if it has other sources of revenue (like a print version or high $$$ conference), or if it has a sugar daddy billionaire (like Jeff Bezos or Pierre Omyidar) who is willing to sustain a money-losing operation, at least for a while.
   
   How do you address this? Good question. If I had the answer I would be living on an island somewhere, drinking frothy cocktails while dictating this answer to my manservant. But I think the revenue model for publications needs to change; paywalls are going to be necessary, and people will need to be willing to cough up a lot more personal information to marketers if they want access to quality journalism. Or maybe traditional media will just go away and we’ll be left with media operations controlled entirely by fortune 100 corporations and a bunch of small-fry bloggers who do this just for fun.
   
   One way readers can address this: Stop clicking on stupid shit. Shun the clickbait headlines and the sites that do nothing but re-post. Support media sites that try to do right by their readers. Subscribe via paywalls or sign up for services like Blendle, which charge a few dimes per article and share the revenue with the media sites. That’s a really interesting model that I hope succeeds.