back in 2016 -- as soon as editors started greedily gobbling up the pitches from lazy freelancers -- DM'ing with extremely online racists became synonymous with "journalism"pic.twitter.com/hXC5U5nNKs
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In a media world with minuscule budgets for travel and research, and with freelancers needing to deliver 2-3 stories a day to stay afloat, this was a kind of golden age for bad, thumbsucking content
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There are few subjects more willing to talk at length for the sake of a 2000-word profile than some alt-right thought leader who spends most of his day hanging out in mom's basement and firing off angry tweets
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Any subject who responds to your interview request within seconds and then talks to you for hours -- the key to the "success" of these alt-right "thought leaders" -- is maybe not the appropriate interview subject, just going by their thirst alone
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So would they just DM some random anonymous account that used racial slurs and had a pepe frog picture and that would be their story?
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Yep. I wrote two such stories for VICE. I talked to Ricky Vaughn, the Twitter reactionary, on Twitter for many hours across several days. I quickly realized this was why I needed to get back to the world of 9 to 5 work ... I didn't want to hustle this kind of material
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