Specialist journalists have gone the way of the dodo. The big publications have a difficult time justifying paying specialists for sections or columns that simply are not widely read. Whether it is religion or science, niche topics have become the purview of generalized journalists who have no specialization in the topics to which they've been assigned.

What stories she is sent on seems random and covering a wide range of expertise.

Is it partly a reflection of the public's wish to just get something easy to read and not to technical?

First, there's the Cognitive Miser Theory. Mental processing can be tasking; we want to get to the point quickly and efficiently. Pages and pages of copy are antithetical to this arguably-innate desire.

Related to that is the issue of relevance. People don't always see how seemingly tedious information relates to their lives. Discovering the Higgs Boson or explaining in painful detail the assorted revelations to Joseph Smith aren't going to lower the rent, put gas in the car, or keep the plant from closing. Explaining these things is a pointless endeavor if you first have to explain why they should even care about them in the first place.

So, by my approximation, roughly half the readership is too lazy to trudge through a detailed article, while the other half couldn't be bothered with these sections to begin with. Why pay good money on a highly-educated science journalist when you buy up a bunch of TMZ-quality celebrity gossips for a bigger return?

Most of what I know I've found on my own through internet searches. At one point I left a desktop link to a Shia/Sunni map of the Mid East on my computer to reference when the MSM was covering events in the region. There was never much background or larger context to the coverage.

And little coverage of the Muslim populations in the US.