But even taking it literally, isn't that one of the things LLMs could actually do? You're essentially asking how a text generator could generate text. The real question is whether the questions would be any good, but the answer isn't necessarily no.

You used to need them, because journalists had the distribution and the sources didn't. In a word of printed newspapers, you couldn't get your story distributed nationally (much less worldwide) without the help of a journalist, doubly so if you wanted to stay anonymous.

Nowadays, you just make a Substack and there's that.

See that recent expose on the Delve fraud as just one example. No journalists were harmed in the making of that article.

Journalism is by definition a secondary source. (Notwithstanding edge cases like articles reporting directly on the news industry itself.)