Well there's several reasons really. To begin with, the newspaper industry in general is dying. If a newspaper is someone's main source of news in this day and age, that person is in the minority. Most people get their news from TV and the internet.

Newspapers 3 main sources of revenue are advertisements, the classifieds, and subscriptions. The internet giving us the ability to get the news instantly, rather than having to wait for the paper to arrive in the morning has greatly hurt subscriptions. Craigslist (and the like) has nearly killed the classifieds. Think about it. Why would you pay to put an ad in the classifieds when you can list it on craigslist for free, and more people will see it there. It's a win-win. So the newspapers are losing money from subscriptions and classifieds. And that leads to another loss of revenue: advertisements. Businesses are advertising less and less in the newspaper because they don't get nearly as much bang for their buck. Companies have a limited budget for advertising. Why put that money into newspaper ads when they can put ads in other mediums that far more people will see.

I had 2 friends who worked for the Bee up until a few years ago. One was an IT guy. He saw the writing on the wall, got a better job in Santa Barbara and left. He said when he left, they were in such bad financial shape that in order to save costs on paper, they had decreased the width of the newspaper to the smallest the printing presses would allow for. My other friend was a graphic designer and got laid off. When he started the Bee had something like 15 people in his department. When he was let go they were down to 3 I believe.

What does all this have to do with the stories they report? Well, the stories need to be cheap. You want more in-depth reporting, more investigative journalism. I'm with you, that'd be nice. But that involves having journalists work for days, weeks, even months, on a single story. All the while they have to pay the journalist their salary while not getting any stories in the paper from that journalist during that time. They simply don't have the money to do that. They are down to a bare bones staff that is the minimum necessary to put out a daily paper. They simply don't have the money to give to other journalists to do that in-depth reporting.