Let's face it; at the current time, the gaming media is in dire straits. Traffic has gone down, partly due to recent controversy. Their reputation is at rock bottom, after posting everything from unverified rumours to random things from internet forums to deliberately inflammatory clickbait to gain views.
Practically speaking, it's not gonna last much longer in its current state.
So how would you save it? How would you fix the gaming press to make it actually somewhat decent for once?
Is it even possible to fix a world-wide spread of corruption? You have sites like Kotaku that give 50% accurate information, sites like IGN that up-vote games just to stay on the good side of developers, and then sites, as you said, that simply use clickbait to gain hits then make up rumors and lies just to get hypes started and activity drawn-in.
I think at this point the only way to "save" the industry would be to only allow 1st-party reports similar to Nintendo Directs but daily. However, then you would be left with developers up-voting their own work which just brings us back to IGN again, because let's face it, no developer is going to go 'yeah, the camera has issues following your character and the controls are a bit too tight but otherwise we think it is a really great game!".
1. More regulation/enforcement. Like, get the advertising standards authority, office of fair trading, etc on the case when it comes to the gaming industry and the media there.
Cause there are quite a few laws being broken here. For instance, you're supposed to more clearly state whether you've been getting free stuff or influence from publishers, not just hide it on some disclaimer somewhere on another page. And if some of the recent gamejournopros stuff and blacklist rumours are accurate, you could get them down on fraud, cartel behaviour, discrimination, etc. Kind of like what happened to FIFA.
That would quite quickly force at least some change.
2. The independent world disrupts the incumbent media altogether and replaces it.
Something like a peer to peer combination of Uber and Yelp maybe?
Make them utterly irrelevant, and you'll destroy them.
