I don't know that this is what happened here, but any time there is a push to do more with less, you end up rewarding people who take shortcuts over those who do a proper job, and from the outside, it looks like journalism has a push to do more with less.

That's basically the problem. If the shortcut produces something passable 95% of the time and nobody is checking, it just looks like you're faster. Journalism just has a more public failure mode than most fields.