In 2016, the Associated Press freed more than 2,000 slaves.

The reporters located fishermen held captive on a remote island, in cages, and then traced the supply chain all the way to US distributors. The investigation won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. I was in college, and it seemed to me that journalism could make me a terribly important person. After all, I could literally free slaves.

I moved to NYC after graduation and took the first job I could find, which was: writing four articles a day for Newsweek. All those noble aspirations culminated in: Fox News Hosts Repeat Trump's Bizarre Rally Claims About Shower Pressure Restrictions: 'Trump Will Allow You to Take a Shower in Seven Seconds'.

I got advice: to escape clickbait, find a gig “behind a paywall.” It was good advice. In 2020, I went to work for a heavily paywalled unit at Business Insider.

The marching orders were to write articles, containing information that people couldn’t read anywhere else, about tech companies. Which is a numbers game. Hard-hitting journalism, I came to learn, wasn’t trench coats and parking garages as much as it was, especially in the remote work era: spreadsheets. Thousands of LinkedIn messages and emails, telling people you’ve heard “interesting things” and you’d love their “input.” You have not heard interesting things, at first. But the goal is to get them on the phone.

Say it’s a complicated investigation, and you talk to 20 people for 30 minutes each. That’s 400 pages of raw transcripts. Your story can be, like, maybe 12. You can’t just type it up. How do you wrestle it all into submission? Everyone’s approach varies.

There’s this idea that what survives the Great Crunching is about bias. Not exactly. Let me put it this way. At my new employer, Pirate Wires (Mike Solana's band of woke-allergic misfits), they call traditional media “blob media,” or “blob.” I’ve never asked why because it makes intuitive sense to me. It feels like a blob, it acts like a blob, and it blobs, the verb. It blobs your thinking, your voice. There’s no committee setting a Deliberate Agenda. It’s more like: it’s just blob. Groupthink. The absence of kooks and weirdos.

THE PEOPLE WE WROTE AROUND

Leading up to 2020, three things supercharged BI’s growth. Distribution peaked (Facebook and Google were putting the journalism in front of millions of people); readers were reading (the chaos of Trump’s first election and then the pandemic had them doom-scrolling like crazy); and the economy was relatively strong, so companies were spending more on ads. Editorially, this afforded latitude. According to lore, someone pitched, and was granted, a “sneakers beat.”