Exactly the right question. Journalism has been given a lifeline, a way out of the attention economy.

Abrogate the direct primary inputs. Weather sensors. Wildfire cameras. Police scanners. Court proceedings. Changes to ordinances. New LLC filings. Bankrupcies. Birth records. Death records. The whole corpus of society that is automatically logged and used as the primary data for people to then perform research or develop journalism upon.

That is what you siphon up. And in output you can mad lib out an article just like those johnny on the spot AP reporters do anyhow, filling in the skeleton article about a death or an attack or a banquet or award show with the relevant input concerning the event. LLM isn't even used for finding this input but to just adjust the boilerplate, perhaps to tailor news specifically to the reader's own inclinations based on engagement with other articles collected via fingerprinting.

I'd wager 95% of what we call journalism today could simply disappear with no replacement and the world would be better off.

Potentially social media to a certain degree, at least for raw "news" of what is happening.

Of course that willm be shit, but there we are.

Doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on behaviors that most consumers wish they'd stop doing. You used to work at Google so you must be familiar with how groupthink operates.