Digitally, many free newspaper sites have become click-hungry attics of tat. They have to be. Newspapers do not fit the internet age in part because the web cannibalizes their content so ruthlessly. The popular press provides humor, one-fact stories, pictures with captions, scabrous tales and gossip. So does everything else online.

Aiming to be upscale brings no safety. The Guardian was once heralded, not least by itself, as a paragon of successful, intelligent journalism. A pioneer of free online news, it is exporting its brand at great cost to new markets like America and Australia. This year, The Guardian will lose more than $88 million. Its messianic former editor, Alan Rusbridger, has been unceremoniously booted from his proposed emeritus role — a sort of guardian of The Guardian — as the head of the trust that bankrolls the paper. The business is in tatters.

The future of British journalism, with its proud history of mischief-making and scurrility, is questionable then, with few and limited bright spots. The audience for print seems to be lasting longer than some digital evangelists once predicted.

The Daily Mail is focusing its marketing efforts on the over 65s, hoping to make a life preserver out of the rising life expectancy of its majority female readership — a following largely inspired by its deliberate, offhand meanness, specializing in articles written by women for women who hate women. The Sun can still call an election correctly, can still elicit outrage and comment. The Mirror, The Sun and The Mail hope to turn their vast online audiences into a profitable business model.

And there is a gradual resurgence of a willingness to pay for quality. The Times and The Sunday Times, paywalled and protected, have become profitable perhaps for the first time in history. Paywalls — once seen as an embodiment of Luddism in the giddy world of the free internet — now seem essential to the survival of professional writing.

Yet there has never been a more hostile environment to journalism than exists today, and not only in economic terms. The democratizing effect of social media, a potentially healthful development, has also given rise to a cynicism directed toward the mainstream media. This is all part of a new angriness in politics.

In Britain, the hard left assumed control of the Labour Party last year after the election of its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who looks like a dufferish old uncle but is followed by a cult of rageful acolytes. They despise the “MSM,” The Guardian and The Daily Mail alike, howling their disgust into the void of social media. (I once made a joke about Mr. Corbyn and was told on Twitter that I should “die of the bad AIDS.”)