Unless you are working on one of those Pulitzer articles, it's just not going to get the attention or fact checking it deserves. (And many newspapers long ago ditched their fact checker positions.)
That is the absolute truth. Everyone's goal appears to be get a story out first, and to hell with anything being correct. Corrections can be done later, after incorrect names and info have been published. I've long believed many stories are written on an iPhone while the reporter is sitting in bed.
And every story must be accompanied by a picture. If it's an accident on 95 in Wilmington, a picture of a cop car, traffic driving along a random area of highway, or a Google Maps shot suffices.
If you want to see a story in action: I often go to public meetings about road projects. Maybe they'll be announced in the paper in advance, or talked about afterwards, but rarely both (at least in my area). It doesn't matter what the viewpoint of the audience is, the article will be negative towards the project. If there's 1,000 people in attendance, 999 people have the same view and 1 has an opposing view to the project, that 1 will be interviewed and their statement printed. Anyone who wasn't in attendance will thing that most people had that opposing view, when in fact is was just the opposite.
One memorable instance of reporters just printing whatever they feel like was when a nearby street had a few 4 way stops added. There's very little traffic on the street, but obviously those living on the street wanted traffic to slow down more. There happened to be an article after the signs went up, and one neighbor said how much safer she felt to cross the street. I live near this street. I'm on this street almost daily. And I walk along the street as well. I'm thinking...I've never seen much traffic on the street, and if someone was crossing the street, my one car wasn't going to make a difference, nor have I ever had to wait for more than a car or two. How these reporters manage to find these people is mind-boggling.
And with newspaper and traditional media cutting back, a lot of these journalist college students wind up trying to find any work at all. Remember recently when everyone was upset that a teenager caught trick-or-treating could be sentenced to 6 months in jail? Turns out that was some very old law in some very old city that an inspiring journalist happen to see. He wrote up an article on it, submitted it to a click-bait website, and it managed to get wings. That's how much of today's reporting gets done - find shit that isn't really applicable or sounds way worse than what it is, hope it gets noticed, and watch the innocent mayors and other public officials try to figure out what's going on, and try to insist that no 14 year old will be seeing a half-year of jail for wearing a costume.