Few days late on this, but want to chip in. The thing that actually started to annoy me the last few months are some people at gaming websites and magazines that actively distance themselves from the term journalist, and then for some reason think they aren't responsible when they write wrong stuff. I know I don't do earth shattering reporting and write about videogames and fun stuff, but I sure as hell am a journalist when doing that. If you are a film or music journalist when writing about those fields, then you are a game journalist when writing about games. Whether you are a good one is a seperate issue of course.
The decreasing quality is something you see in every field. Not an excuse, but it comes with the internet. People demand their updates instantly and when you are competing with stuff like Twitter and forums like here to get a story out, fact checking tends to go out the window or just put in a later update. Now when you are in the business for some time, you get used to it and can seperate the fakes from the trues a lot of times, but other times you mess up. Again, not an excuse, but I can see why it happens. It's a difficult issue, since the (active) reader demands the stories quickly but also wants quality, but it is impossible to always offer both.
And no, I haven't studied journalism also. From my colleagues I do see it helps in the early months with better writing quality, structure in the stories, etc, but more important is the overall atmosphere at the website/magazine. If everyone thinks it is acceptable to deliver bad quality, the guys who studied journalism will also slack off, while it is also true the other way around.