Gonna add the opening quote, because it is glorious:
You cannot make friends with the rock stars…if you’re going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company.
[There’s] fuckin’ nothin’ about you that is controversial. God, it’s gonna get ugly. And they’re gonna buy you drinks, you’re gonna meet girls, they’re gonna try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs. I know, it sounds great, but these people are not your friends. You know, these are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars and they will ruin rock ‘n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it.
Because they’re trying to buy respectability for a form that’s gloriously and righteously dumb.
Lester Bangs, Almost Famous (2000)
EDITED TO ADD: If you want a good companion piece to this, Devs and the Culture of Tech by @UnseriousAcademic is a damn good read, going deep into the cultural issues which leads to the fawning tech press Zitron so thoroughly tears into.
on a side note a lot of how I think about merit was built up by reading and rereading fooled by randomness as a teenager. I won’t endorse it because that was a long time ago and the author is a narcissist, but maybe other people have thoughts on it? I would love to hear some discussion of it