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They are gems in the rough, but they do exist.

One that instantly comes to my mind is Matt Levine from Bloomberg, who writes on finance. People on HN seem to be holding him in high regard as well, whenever his name comes up.

I wouldn't say it is due to the industry of his choice commonly having quality journalists that have legitimate knowledge of the industry, though. Finance journalism is very densely packed with typical trash journos, just like other industries.

I have an armchair theory that higher barriers to entry in the industry (in terms of the pre-existing knowledge that target readers have) increases the likelihood of a quality journalist like Matt Levine appearing. Gaming journalism requires almost no prerequisite knowledge from readers aside from playing games, so the average quality of "game journalism" is abysmal, and people who read those articles are usually just all kinds of people. Same thing with "pop science", because everyone wants to jump on the next clickbait about some miracle drug or other futuristic sounding stuff. With finance journalism, most average people on the street have zero interest in reading those articles, so the audience self-selects mostly towards those who already have the pre-requisite knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, so the demand in terms of quality of the journalism from the target audience is higher on average. Which would increase the probability of someone like Matt Levine popping up, since those people are much more valued and sought after.

That's just my personal guess though, so I don't encourage anyone here to take the entire previous paragraph as a fact.




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