I think our attention disorder deficit world (1) and the lack of transparency (2) lead to just that: Lack of demand for high quality journalism. (1) Quality journalism usually demands time and attention from the reader since it presents itself in multi-page articles that try to distill down to the important facts. Oftentimes reality is so complex, that even this distilled view is difficult to read and takes some time to understand. People who just want to read some news between checking facebook or tweeting are not interested in these long and elaborate articles. (2) Even for short articles, it is difficult to assess the quality of it since there's no way (or only a difficult way) of figuring out whether an article is high quality or low quality. In order to find out, you'd need to be an expert in the specific domain or re-do the work of the journalist (fact checking, etc). Since most readers neither can do the one or the other, for a normal reader this lack of transparency (or information asymmetry, as the economists say) means that he doesn't see the difference between high and low quality. So there's little demand, too.

I do think that there'll be a future where high quality journalism is flourishing, but not with the current business models, and not with the current way of news publishing. My hope is that at some point a startup will figure out the correct ingredients (and I doubt social news, or anything in that domain is the answer)