Here's an optimistic take on journalism: when search is solved, when the algorithm is cracked and commoditized, search boils down to: who has access to the data. Search engines will need to either pay the data sources (news outlets, journals, websites, reddit) for their content, or provide some kind of revenue sharing. Because people will go to specific search engines because they know they've indexed that kind of data. That'll be the competitive edge: search engine X indexed data Y so if I'm looking for something in Y I'll visit X, and X gets money for it.

Sure it's a bet, but I have a strong hunch that this stuff will be commoditized within ten years. Because what it really is is AI. Search is an AI-complete problem. Once AI is cracked, search will be cracked, and it'll all boil down to the underlying data. And search will go from a being a monopoly to being a commodity, and the power will shift back to the journalists/authors/users.