I've heard a lot of apparently hot takes over the years about how journalists are obsolete in the internet age. You may recall Jared Polis' words when the Rocky Mountain News fell in 2009: "The media is dead, and long live the new media, which is all of us." Can you imagine 1/

how batshit crazy this election would have been without journalists explaining it at every twist and turn? Can you imagine if no one was breaking down every court challenge so everyday people could follow along, if no one explained what "mail" and "absentee" and "provisional" 2/

ballots are, and if no one had any grasp on why some ballots are counted at different times? Imagine if we had no journalists to explain the bare fact that mail ballots are counted later for procedural reasons in states where mail ballots aren't usually common — and not, 3/

as many will still claim without evidence, because they were part of some vast voter-fraud scheme? Imagine if we didn't have journos at every hour providing the context to pace us through which results to expect next, and where. It would have been chaos. There would have been 4/

no rhyme or reason to any of these election results, and everyone would have been shouting into their Instagram Live feeds about whatever hogwash conspiracy their QAnon-believing relative was peddling at the moment. We would have seen so much more unrest in the streets amid 5/

the heightened confusion. The U.S. would have truly looked like a failed democracy. I cannot thank enough all the journalists who worked tirelessly, night and day, to make sense of these presidential results, throughout the nation, to keep us grounded. 6/

In more ways than we realize right now, it may be part of the glue that kept this country from entirely coming undone. This job is not something any rando with a laptop and a decent internet signal can do. And I'd hate to speak too soon on this, but it's not a job 7/

that a bunch of ones and zeroes in artificial intelligence can properly do either. We need attentive, careful, determined reporters to lead us through these moments. Thankful that, despite the challenges of the past two decades, we still have so many that haven't given up. 8/8