Who is more likely to uphold journalism’s ideals of uncovering inconvenient truths, holding the powerful to account, and writing the first draft of history: a handful of decaying, unwieldy legacy news organizations or a million YouTubers?

Nick Shirley, a twenty-three-year-old YouTuber whose investigation into millions of dollars of alleged day-care fraud in Minneapolis has drawn praise from Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, might look, at first glance, like the future of journalism. In a video posted on X the day after Christmas, Shirley combines two of the foundational modes of live-streaming circa 2025—the man-on-the-street interview and the thrill-seeking adventure into an unknown and ostensibly dangerous place, whether the Mongolian Steppe or a tent encampment in Philadelphia—to produce a roughly hour-long narrative. He adopts the role of a guy who simply wants to know more about a problem, going from day-care center to day-care center in Minnesota and asking the people who work there, all of whom are of Somali origin, if they’re the ones stealing taxpayer money.

In Shirley’s most viral scene, which has been clipped and shared millions of times, he walks up to a storefront with a misspelled sign reading “Quality Learing Center.” According to Shirley’s investigative partner for the video—a man whom he refers to only as David—this day care has been licensed to care for ninety-nine children and received four million dollars in taxpayer funding. In a surreal moment, Shirley and David are confronted by a woman in the parking lot who mistakes them for federal immigration agents and starts yelling to anyone who might be inside, “Don’t open up! You have ICE here,” to which Shirley responds, “How do you have ICE here, ma’am? I’m literally a YouTuber.” The rest of the video is more of the same: Shirley walks into buildings, sometimes under the guise of trying to enroll his fictional son “little Joey” into the day care, and then interviews the people he finds there, whether workers or random passersby.

If you’re among the credulous who believe there’s no political motivation behind Shirley’s reportage, there’s a thrill to watching all this unfold, especially because Shirley presents himself as just some dude on a quest for the truth. He is quite talented in this role, for what it’s worth. The best on-camera investigators often come across as Shirley does: curious, a bit slow, and pathologically stubborn about asking the same questions over and over.

After Shirley posted the video, the Minneapolis Star Tribune visited the same day-care centers and also combed through court filings and state enforcement records. They found no evidence of fraud, although a few of the centers had incurred other violations, particularly Quality Learning Center, which, the Star Tribune notes, has been “cited for multiple safety violations.” This doesn’t mean that day-care fraud has not taken place in Minneapolis—there’s a years-long history of such malfeasance, and both state and federal law enforcement have convicted dozens of offenders, as . But the reason that we (and, I imagine, Shirley) know that this has been going on for a while is because local news outlets have, indeed, on it.