I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non profit trade groups, as they're generally full of people with very tight butts about journalistic integrity and fewer advertisers/grant committees to please.

Honestly though the goal is to get a good lay of the land for both how a story goes from whiteboard/notebook brainstorm to print, and the general shape of the industry.

Small but impactful example: headlines are often written by a different person than the article. This leads to a lot of conflict, which is healthy in terms of producing quality journalism, but potentially confusing for the consumer who may not understand why.

The main goals would be

- Understand the roles of reporters (gathering), editors (verification), managing editors (suits), publishers (sugar daddies) and their roles for a single given piece, and within the org at large

- Media conglomerates disproportionately dominate local news. It's not just Fox and CNN or the NYT/WaPo, and the impact is far more damaging than the more obvious corporate influence).

These days I tend to stay away from the news for the most part, in an attempt to retain sanity. You don't need 24 hours of news. I read up for about 2-3 hours a week and feel more informed than ever.

Here are a few resources who probably can get you set in a better direction than I would:

Columbia journalism review Nieman lab Poytner institute