It’s as if Mr. Trump’s media attacks have combined with the heightened attention on the perils of fake news to create one big fat advertisement for the value of basic journalism.

“The fake news business is going to be great for journalism in the long run,” Mr. Carter told me Friday, referring to Mr. Trump as “the Fake Newser in Chief.” “Proper news organizations should thrive under this.”

To do so, though, journalism is going to have to find its inner Taylor Swift.

In case you can’t remember all the way back to 2015, Ms. Swift, the pop megastar, stood up to Apple after it tried to give away her songs — and those of her fellow musicians — for free, sans royalties, as part of a promotion for its new streaming service. “We don’t ask you for free iPhones,” she wrote in an open letter to the company.

The music industry might seem like an odd place for people in the hard news game to turn. But, like the news industry, it had spent the better part of this century preparing its obituary as the web made it easy for people to listen to so much music without paying for it.

Then it happened upon the streaming subscription business. People started paying again, even for vinyl, and there’s new talk of a corner turned, as The Financial Times recently reported.

Now, think of the readers as Apple in the showdown with Ms. Swift. In many cases, they’ve been getting news for free that other people pay for through subscriptions. That is because newspapers for so long gave it all away for nothing, only to face dire economic consequences when players like Facebook and Google showed up to gobble up the online advertising market. That put the onus back onto selling subscriptions.

As the country and the world head into this confusing new era, news organizations are in a position to make a newly urgent pitch: Buying a subscription is tantamount to supporting the pillars of democracy. It’s about maintaining the sort of reporting that debunks fake news, holds power accountable and keeps the nation on course in its own imperfect way.