Full disclosure, I used to study journalism. I'm being intentionally provocative. I do want us to question the idea that journalistic writing skills are essential to the goals we have, of an informed public that reacts with wisdom to events.
It's like questioning why tech executives have to be adult-supervision MBAs from an Ivy league. Ostensibly the MBA is trained to be a manager of $anything, but a founding engineer might still be a better CEO due to their special understanding and vision. And that MBA is never going to have as much skin in the game - they're in it for what they can get.
Similarly the journalist is allegedly better trained to tell the story of $anything, but maybe we could do more effective work with subject matter experts who pick up the basics of fact-checking, storytelling, and information design. And journalists, unless they are assigned to cover a beat or do a long investigation, rarely have much invested in a story - if something else juicy comes up, they're onto the next thing by tomorrow. And in the Buzzfeed era, that's becoming the next few minutes.
Any time you read a story by a general-purpose journalist on something you know well, there's a familiar pattern. It all is very slick and authoritative-sounding, but is usually hilariously wrong and simple-minded. Consider that this is happening all the time, for the subjects where you aren't an expert. So much for 'writing skills'.
