It is not unfair to say this article was penned by someone who is just a pen for hire, who can write on any topic and churn the words out to get paid. In this mode there is nothing written from direct personal experience, everything is just copied from the internets and news wires, not really felt. It is not really writing, it is arranging words in a presentable way to be paid. Any soul to it is feigned.
But how does this type of journalism come about?
It does so all the time, every day, when there is something new to write about.
Imagine you work in the media and that there is a lot of public interest in a topic and that there is a market for content. It could be anything, e.g. the dreaded blockchain, some new bird flu etc.
There are broadcasters with a public service remit that means having original programming or current affairs programming is expected to fill a quota. Therefore, much to your surprise, there is a market for 'original journalism' to fill that gap, with real money on offer to those that can provide the content.
Your company needs all the work that it can get so you pitch for that documentary on 'blockchain and internet cat pictures', saying that it will only cost $50000 and be done by next Tuesday. Your programme gets commissioned and now you have the problem of filling 45 minutes of screen time with a lot of informative stuff you know nothing about. But this is not a problem.
Your researchers, that were paid to research bird flu yesterday, are now having to research the dreaded blockchain and how this is helping cats get paid for their pictures online. Of course you fire any researchers that fail the task, therefore it is impossible for your researchers to fail. They could research how the moon landings were faked for one show on a sci-fi channel one week and then be researching the return to the moon for another channel the next week, adjusting their conclusions regarding whether the moon is made of cheese accordingly.
Sausage meat style the programme is put together and the world gets to learn about blockchain or hamsters or whatever it is, the broadcaster get their ratings, the regulatory body see that they have done a 'serious' programme and not some soap re-run and everyone is happy.
The people we expected to see talking about blockchain/hamsters/bird-flu are in the video, the experts and the sceptics, the graphics are as you would imagine them to be plus there will be the presenter explaining facts thanks to a globe-trotting tour of warehouses in China and Iceland, via the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
The normal advertisers will run their normal adverts and everyone will get paid.
This 'sausage factory' style content creation is everywhere. The danger to it is that you really can create a narrative out of thin air. If the facts were known to a story then there would be no need to commission others in the media game to do 'journalism'.
Any story can be told for a price, if the government decided tomorrow to get into research into 'polywater' then over the next few days the media would suddenly be experts on it. Even though there could be no such thing it would happen and new experts, able to be cited by the media, would be borne into existence, to become household names as experts in their fields.
Given this cynical take on how it all works in the media, the error made was to think that not a single reader would check facts, i.e. whether they had been on Twitter or not. To a journalist that does not really expect fact checking to ever happen this is a fair assumption.