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I think it comes across as poor quality writing to people who don't know or care about the insider media/NYT stuff. For those people, there are too many characters in the story, and the meat comes at the end.

But for media insiders, they know who these people are and find the additional detail useful/entertaining. I am in the former camp and wish there had been a timeline or TLDR.

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Generally writing should be judged based on what the author was trying to accomplish, as in this case, does it make a compelling case to its intended audience?

And the intended audience is clearly people who care quite a lot about the "inside baseball" of NYT/Journalism and the media more broadly.

So how the general reader perceives this is irrelevant. It wasn't written for the general reader!

I don't read articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and claim the writing is poor because...it's not written for me and I wouldn't even know where to start in critiquing it.

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