What Would You Do Without the News?

The Experiment

Imagine waking up tomorrow to discover that every journalist in the world had stopped working. Not died, not been imprisoned - simply stopped. Every newsroom dark. Every camera off. Every notebook closed.

What would change?

The first day, probably nothing you would notice. The news you consume is mostly about events that have already happened. The headlines you read this morning were written last night. The breaking news alerts on your phone were filed hours ago. The absence would not be immediately felt, because the information you rely on has already been produced.

The first week, you might notice gaps. The story you were following - the court case, the policy debate, the conflict - would stop being updated. You would check your usual sources and find nothing new. The social media conversation would continue, but it would be recycling the same information, interpreting and reinterpreting events that no one was documenting.

The first month, the gaps would widen into voids. Your city council would meet without anyone reporting what was decided. Your school board would approve a budget without anyone examining it. A factory would discharge chemicals into a river without anyone testing the water. A politician would make a promise without anyone checking whether it was kept.

By the second month, you would be making decisions - about your children's schools, your community's safety, your government's performance - based on rumour, anecdote, and the unverified claims of interested parties. Not because you are credulous, but because the infrastructure that used to verify those claims for you no longer exists.

What Journalists Actually Do

The exercise is useful because it strips away the abstraction and reveals the function.

Journalists do not, primarily, provide you with opinions about the world. That is the least valuable thing they do, and the thing they are most criticised for. They go to places you cannot go, ask questions you cannot ask, read documents you lack access to, and tell you what they found.

A journalist sits through a six-hour council meeting so that you do not have to. A journalist reads the 400-page environmental impact assessment so that you do not have to. A journalist calls the police department, the hospital, the company spokesperson, the government press office, and the anonymous source so that you do not have to. They do this every day, for every story, and the result is a body of verified information that you use to understand the world you live in.

This is not glamorous work. Most journalism is not investigations or war reporting or interviewing heads of state. Most of it is a reporter attending a meeting, reading a document, making phone calls, and writing a story that a few thousand people in a local community will read. This ordinary, unglamorous, poorly paid work constitutes the vast majority of accountability journalism - and it is disappearing fastest.

The Substitutes Do Not Work

When journalism disappears, the demand for information does not. It redirects.

In communities that have lost their newspaper, research by the Center for Media Engagement found that residents turn to social media, word of mouth, and partisan sources. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports found that residents of news deserts consume more national news than locations with local outlets. These substitutes provide information, but they do not provide journalism. They lack corrections policies, fact-checkers, and legal departments that review stories before publication. They send no reporters to attend the meetings, read the documents, or make the phone calls.

The distinction matters because the quality of information determines the quality of the decisions based on it. A community whose only source of information about its water supply is a Facebook post from a concerned neighbour is not equivalently informed to a community whose newspaper has a reporter who covers the water authority, attends its meetings, reviews its test results, and reports when they show contamination.

Both communities may end up knowing that the water is contaminated. The community with the reporter will know it sooner, with more precision, with documented evidence, and with the accountability that comes from public reporting. The community without the reporter will know it later, if at all, and will lack the documentation needed to demand action.

The Value Proposition

The thought experiment leads to a simple conclusion that is surprisingly difficult to act on.

Journalism has value. Not sentimental value, not democratic-ideal value, but practical, measurable, daily value. It is how you learn what the institutions that affect your life are doing. When it works, you barely notice, because the information flows seamlessly into your understanding of the world. When it stops, you notice the absence - but by then, the damage is done.

The challenge is that this value is diffuse. No single story justifies the cost of the institution that produced it. The value is cumulative: hundreds of small stories, most read by few, that together form the informational infrastructure of a functioning community.

This is why journalism is difficult to fund. Its value is real but spread thinly across many beneficiaries, none of whom captures enough of it to justify paying the full cost. It is a public good in the economic sense: non-excludable, non-rivalrous, and chronically underfunded as a result.

The Question

The thought experiment is not hypothetical. It is happening, in slow motion, across thousands of communities that have lost their newspapers, their local broadcasters, and their reporters. The experiment is running. The results are coming in. And so far, they confirm what the thought experiment predicts: communities without local journalism show lower voter turnout, greater polarisation, and increased incumbency advantage according to Medill researchers.

The question is not whether journalism matters. The experiment has answered that.

The question is what you are willing to do about it. Whether that means subscribing to a newspaper, supporting a local news outlet, reading beyond the headlines, or simply recognising that the information you rely on was produced by someone who went somewhere, asked something, and wrote down what they found.

Journalism is the work of people who believe that what happens in the world should be documented, verified, and made public. That work has never been more necessary or more precarious.

The experiment is still running. The outcome is not yet determined.