Sure, it's journalism, but just REALLY long. I read the first few sections, had no idea what the story was about, and had to ask the AI to summarize it. Then manually skimmed for the relevant sections.

A lot of journalism is written inverted pyramid style with the most important facts at the top. This piece was more like a long form investigative piece, which is fine, but without a very engaging hook at the start. It was a lot of fluff and exposition... I think I prefer bullet points for something like this, but to each their own.

Putting the important part of the story after a wall of text is called burying the lede. I think it's possible to write an engaging long-form article without a thousand words before presenting a thesis, but that's not the fashion.

It could be much more concise though. No need to tell us the personal background of all the people.

I think many journalists really want to be novelists though, and it shows.

Except I died three-quarters of the way through reading it and had forgotten to save, so I had to start again at the beginning.

Hmm, weird. I actually posted this a few days ago, but the article was under a different title then. It looks to me like maybe Vice was A/B testing titles, it somehow got a second chance on HN, but with the existing comments merged in and their timestamps changed too...?!

It's a lot clearer with the new title but it sure makes for some confusing threads.