I’ve been watching the new breed of journalists formed by the Sammy trial.
These two clips from Carly lead to an observation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58HsLyBam-s
Here she’s discussing Sammy’s parents and their failed attempt to manufacture political victories. Carly was finance director for Andrew Yang’s campaign in 2020, so she knows how to run a campaign. When you know how something works, you can immediately spot frauds and failures in the same area.
Here she’s discussing Adam Neumann’s WeWork failure. Her earlier background in finance lets her see the REASON for the failure in a way that outsiders can’t. She sees it as mismatched duration and missing corporate board discipline, foreign concepts to a non-banker like me.
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What makes the Sammy Generation different is their backgrounds. They were doing something real before they started fiddling around with journalism. Each has a different background. All have expertise in something besides clickbait.
The current crop of Cancelleds such as Taibbi and Bari Weiss and Batya were trained as journalists. They’ve never done anything else. They only know how to kowtow to power, so that’s what they do.
The Cancelleds see the world the same way as the mainstream professional journalists because that’s what they are. They only know how to follow orthodox fashion. They don’t have an internal set of SKILLS and PRACTICE that would enable them to see the failures of current orthodoxy.
The earliest stage of blogging around 2000 brought in a similar mix of outside backgrounds. Later, a few blogs got big and rich. Those were all run by experienced JOURNALISTS who knew how to clickbait, not by people with real-world skills.
The varied-background model works like a jury. If the new breed wants to preserve their varied skills from the inevitable takeover, they’ll need to formalize the jury structure as a guild or Mutual Benefit Association. Or an octopus.
Polistra's Mill 