The pay stems from the ad money being lost to the internet. Craigslist destroyed classifieds.

And so you have a profession that's either pay to play, or an unpaid internship for life attracting those already well-off.

is there literally anything an elite journalist can do to get blackballed other than MeToo a powerful colleague

We have a weird combination of "renewables are absurdly good for electric power" and "the public hates EV programs because they can't afford them and the push for them coincided with vehicle price spikes due to the pandemic's 1-2 years of production downtime" making things very obnoxious.

We need an SNL sketch that's literally just an English teacher who is absolutely outraged and irate...at the grammar.