Actually, market failure is when the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto optimal. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome

Actually, market failure is when the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto optimal. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where a market participant may be made better-off without making someone else worse-off. This is entirely possible in situations when nobody wants to buy X and nobody is buying X. One common example is when there are externalities involved -- e.g. companies using highly polluting processes that are bourne by not just the customers but also uninvolved 3rd parties. Another common example is due to informational gaps -- imagine a benign physician selling polio vaccinations to a less educated populace that doesn't want them. No one wants to buy, but no sales of vaccinations is very far from Pareto optimal. It is well recognized that non-competitive markets and principal–agent problems can also lead to market failure and there is probably a case to be made that the supply side of high-end journalism suffers from both.