Since the days of the dashing war correspondents of the 1940s, journalism has had a powerful appeal, with romantic notions of journalists working their beat, pounding the pavement in trench coats, sniffing out stories, shining light in dark places, scrutinising power and asking tough questions on behalf of the public. If this concept of journalism requires a massive workforce of journalists employed from cadetship to retirement at vastly profitable newspapers, then journalism is in a critical condition. But it also suggests journalism is more than a set of skills or a designated job – it is an ideal. That ideal has never been fully fulfilled and perhaps never can be. Journalism promised so much that the mythology clouds over what most journalists actually do, day in and day out. More journalists spend their time channelling news from news wires and rewriting press releases than they do collecting brown paper bags of evidence from car parks. But there were always just enough examples to suggest journalism was acting as a credible watchdog on power. To wit, the Pentagon Papers (1971) and Watergate (1973) in the US. The Sunday Times' 1970s campaign on thalidomide and the Guardian's campaign (from 2009) to uncover phone hacking in Britain. In Australia, there might be fewer iconic instances, but there are many examples of influential investigations such as "The Moonlight State" investigations of corruption in Queensland (1986-87), or Fairfax's exposure of the note-printing bribery scandal involving the Reserve Bank of Australia's subsidiary currency firms (2009). When the key reporter who pursued phone hacking in Britain, Nick Davies, was in Australia last month, he said journalists told themselves a fantasy to get themselves out of bed each morning: that they could expose wrongdoing and it would stop. In his experience, he said, this was untrue. Even after exposure, the bad things often continued.

Power adapts. It flows around blockages. And there are many limiting, structural factors that mean journalism rarely ever truly threatens political or corporate power. Those limits include the nature of commercial media, ownership concentration, relations between news media and governments, the high costs of investigative journalism, audience interests and definitions of "news values". Often, as the history of newspapers shows, newspapers have been on the wrong side of progress, opposing women's suffrage, defending the White Australia policy, or promoting the Vietnam War, for example. Despite the billions of stories printed in newspapers over the past 100 years, how often has a story brought down a leader or government? Sometimes, in some places, but enough to fulfil what we might expect from an institution that claims to be a "fourth estate" holding power to account? Or should we judge journalism's worth not by its rare grand exposes but by its incremental contributions, the small openings that have furthered social progress over the past century? Even those sporadic moments of exposure might be enough to make powerful people restrain themselves from bad conduct. There are reasonable questions to ask about journalism and what it achieves. But even if journalism has fallen short of its promised ideal, it is still sad to see so many journalists unceremoniously booted from an industry whose ideals they valued and worked very hard for. As I have interviewed journalists and press photographers recently, I've been astounded by the sacrifices they made working in such a demanding and high-pressure industry. As I have interviewed journalists and press photographers recently, I've been astounded by the sacrifices they made working in such a demanding and high-pressure industry. I've also been reading old copies of staff news magazines from The Herald and Weekly Times group and Fairfax. There was a sense of solidity and permanence. In the 1950s, there are many articles about workers being commended for 40 years of service. In the 1970s, there were "welfare officers" who visited sick staff members and supported their families. There were staff "recreation rooms" with billiard tables. In 1970, there was a worker at the Herald who had worked for the company for 50 years and had spent the previous 18 years in the small "copy box" where news articles arrived via suction tubes running across the building. In the late 1970s, when computers were introduced to newsrooms, managers boldly promised "no man will lose his job" because of new technology.

It is an odd feeling looking at the faces of the workers in these old staff magazines. There was a sense of certainty, almost invincibility, about them – that the monumental grand buildings in which they worked, the power and prestige of newspaper work, protected them. Fast forward to today with heavy job losses, casualisation and industry uncertainty. For some radical critics, the decline of old-school journalism in powerful organisations is a good thing. But what will replace it? Nothing yet has proven to be economically sustainable, with popular audience reach, and enough independence from the corporations that control the internet (including search engines and portals) to achieve what traditional journalism aspired to do. Even with our eyes open, knowing the "fourth estate/watchdog" model to have been more of an ideal than a consistent reality, to all of the journalists – past and present – who believed in that ideal and contributed to it, I convey the gratitude of your audiences and fellow citizens. But that isn't enough. We also need to pay our subscriptions to services we value, give journalism our attention, and provide feedback about what we want from journalism today. If we still want journalism, knowing all of its limitations but still valuing its contributions, we have to help sustain its ideals and those who work towards them. Sally Young is an Age columnist and associate professor of political science at the University of Melbourne.