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.

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.

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.