Will there be journalists in 2030?

This debate is not about whether or not the problems of the business model for news will or will not have been solved by 2030. Fake news has generated many claims that journalism is more needed than it has ever been. But the threat of ‘disintermediation’ by digital technology has not gone away. Distribution of news by social networks has decoupled that distribution from the newsrooms which do the journalism. Anyone with a smartphone can bid to be a publisher. How do journalists justify their existence in this context? Will the historians of a 100 years from now think it odd that for several centuries there was a professional class which gathered and processed information about the world on our behalf?