It’s endlessly frustrating that public-trust journalism (especially investigative journalism) is so often held up nostalgically as the profession’s ideal, when that’s really not how the industry works now.

Plenty of journalists routinely populate their work with their mates, lean heavily on PR, trawl online discussion forums for quotes, and turn their social networking presences into brains trusts.

I’ve spotted my industry friends openly asking Facebook and Twitter for story leads or interviewees, or even brainstorming questions ahead of interviewing international celebrities. I’ve done it too.

Every so often Media Watch will blow open a particular piece of PR guff. And the Centre for Independent Journalism has analysed how widespread PR-driven content is in Australian newspapers.

Yet this stuff eludes discussions of quality journalism because it’s summarily dismissed as bad journalism. Rather than ask why information gathering has taken this turn, media commentators are content to name and shame the offenders.

Instead, we need to make contemporary, internet-led, PR-informed journalism more transparent, impartial and ethical. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with using social networking sites as primary research tools. But we need to distinguish between research that is scrupulous, intelligent and original, and that which is lazy, unimaginative and exploitative.

The industrial reality is that journalists are short on time and budget, but long on contacts developed and nurtured online. It’s rare these days to do library research or groom potential sources face to face. Instead, a journo’s key professional toolbox includes Twitter, Facebook and Google.

When I first taught online journalism at Monash University, I was shocked to discover that most of my students were not Gen-Y tech heads; rather, for them the internet comprised what they could Google or access through Facebook.

Some were not tenacious researchers. They weren’t good at structuring their searches to yield targeted results, tended to give up when they reached the limit of their resources, and asked for help rather than inventing new approaches.

It’s when working journalists behave like my students did that they resort to leaning on publicists, padding out trend pieces with clichés, and outright plagiarism. So a solution here might be to teach more inventive, resourceful internet search techniques.

Another problem with over-reliance on social networks is that journalists don’t observe a personal/professional divide. While everyone has, at one time, asked friends and family for work-related advice, it used to be done privately. These days, many journalists don’t even feel the need to appear independent in public.

Recently, a certain weekend lifestyle newspaper supplement put a call out in its own pages seeking quirky shops for an upcoming feature. This week, a journalist from the magazine was emailing around — including her former editor — asking for more quirky shop leads.

This episode reveals not just shamelessness and stunted research skills, but also a worrying placement of the story-cart before the story-horse. This magazine is clearly choosing its content based on nebulous concepts rather than real-life observations. And it’s happy to reveal as much to its readers.

But at least it was explicit. Often, only when you work in the industry yourself do you realise (for instance) how many ordinary people featured in trend pieces and vox pops are in fact staffers from the admin or ad departments, or mates of the writer or editor.

Launched last September, SourceBottle is a leads service that connects journalists with potential sources. Because it operates via email, it avoids the scattershot approach of stumbling across information in a Facebook or Twitter feed, and it allows journalists and sources to be specific and filter the appeals that interest them.

Site founder Rebecca Derrington tells Crikey the most popular genres in which journalists request sources are social/cultural trends, lifestyle, business/entrepreneurial, women/parenting and health.

“In terms of publications that are using the service most heavily, I’d say e-mags/blogs, newspapers, magazines and television networks, in that order,” Derrington says.

SourceBottle can put fairly cynical practices out in the open, and for this reason has been the subject of derision among media observers. It can also foster epic journalistic laziness.

But I believe SourceBottle is ethical because it’s public and impersonal. The calls are published openly and don’t rely on individual journalists’ personal networks.

It’s also like journalistic junk food: best consumed as part of a balanced research diet.

“I think it’s fair enough for journalists to be concerned if their colleagues are relying exclusively on services like SourceBottle,” Derrington tells Crikey. “However, journalists generally use it to supplement their more traditional information-gathering methods … I’d stress that it’s just another tool to include in a journalist’s arsenal.”

In January, Brisbane freelancer Andrew McMillen used SourceBottle as a starting point for a feature on country music. Only through painstaking research, including 18 phone interviews, did McMillen figure out what his story angle would be. He later described it as “the most exhilarating journalistic experience of my life”.

Surely that excitement of using your own brain to uncover fresh information is the right reason to work in journalism.