You&#x27;ll be fine in the short term. But in 30 years, when there is no one even pretending to serve as a check against institutional abuses, when 0% of the electorate has any idea at all what is happening in the world, when if you find that something unconscionable there is absolutely no way to get people to know or care about it... what then?<p>In a world without press that is listened to, a bad actor could literally remount the Holocaust in plain sight and no one would stop it because <i>no one would know</i>.<p>Public officials act in the public interest because their constituencies read the news and demand that something be done about it. Sure, this isn&#x27;t what they do all or even most of the time, but can you imagine a world where it doesn&#x27;t happen at all?<p>Many facets of government and business cannot function without some sort of professional collection and analysis of facts about what&#x27;s happening in the world. I expect that in our post-journalism society, public and private intelligence agencies will expand enormously and start doing something that looks an awful lot like journalism, except for very small and inordinately wealthy institutional readers instead of the public.