I can imagine there are lots of cases where that might work. But for example, if you are covering a small town police scandal or something, you might end up wanting to talk to people who’d rather not comment online or might not even have a super strong online presence/identity.

I don’t know you, but lots of people on this site do internet stuff, if you are for example an open source contributor worth reporting on, academic, or somebody like that, you probably are exactly the sort of person that an LLM would be best at contacting, right?

Yes, it can't work that way for all things, but you'd be surprised how many journalists don't leave their offices even for stuff like talking to police. Some do but they tend to be the more serious ones working on a big project where they want to do in depth face to face interviews. The idea of shoe leather is as bit old fashioned I'm afraid. And LLMs have the massive advantage that they work a lot faster, and can work 24/7 without complaining.