[bastawhiz]

I think the point was that she was so bad at her job that she wasn't going to write anything about the attack, at all, whatsoever. She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone. She didn't have the initiative to walk to ground zero. And then what she did write was a story about how she was sad the fun events were cancelled but she wasn't that sad because she had appletinis.

She just didn't care. Her focus was on the fun events that she had planned to attend and absolutely nothing else.

[FearNotDaniel]

I'm not picking on you deliberately, only choosing to reply to this thread because your wording succinctly sums up the underlying mistake in most people commenting here:

> so bad at her job

Her job was as a fashion journalist. Not a news reporter, not a war correspondent, not somebody who was remotely trained or prepared to deal with a situation like this. How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".

It's irrelevant whether you or anyone else here thinks fashion is valuable, or interesting, or worth writing about. It is relevant to question whether all "journalists" are, or should be, interchangeable in the eyes of people working in a completely unrelated profession.

[cthalupa]

A lot of the underlying principles of journalism are the same regardless of your focus, though. I can't imagine a journalist being at the site of something as momentous as 9/11 and not paying attention to it. Especially knowing you are the only resource your paper has in the area.

>How often do we tech people get irritated by pointy-haired bosses saying "hey, you're an IT person, can't you just do (this thing that is not remotely related to your skill set)".

I don't get annoyed when I am asked to do something in emergency situations of significantly smaller scales than 9/11. I'm not an electrician or electronics engineer, but I have to apply troubleshooting methodology in a way day to day that a lot of people don't, so there have been times where I was the best suited person to try and figure out Weird Electronic Issue X when shit hit the fan. It doesn't annoy me, I just set expectations that I'm not an expert and I might not be able to fully resolve it.

And a lot of the fundamental principles of journalism are just as, if not more, applicable when crossing between fashion and the massive world event happening right beside you. This sort of event is outside of her area of expertise, sure. But no one is knocking her for having attempted to cover it, and not doing so as well as a news reporter or war correspondent would have.

The underlying problem with this piece is that it isn't really about fashion, and it isn't really about 9/11. It's a journal of her day, with weirdly tone-deaf bits about riding in expensive limos and raising glasses of appletinis and then being thankful that she is Canadian.

[bastawhiz]

To the grandparent's point, though: she didn't even write about fashion. Even if she didn't write yet another news story, she seems like she was entirely prepared to write absolutely nothing. There was no natural sense of curiosity: even though I'm no SRE, I'm still going to observe the worst outage in software engineering history. Maybe there's lessons that I can take away. Maybe there's an interesting observation relevant to my expertise that I can point out.

If your job is to write about fashion, and you can't even be bothered to really write about that, what are you doing?

[Beldin]

> Her job was as a fashion journalist.

The reason this doesn't excuse her for me, is that a journalist - of any type - is supposed to absorb events, place them in their context, and convey the result to a general public.

So she may have been hired as a fashion journalist, but this shows her to not rise above a fashion writer. That is, someone who produces stories, not someone who reports on events.

Or, to put it differently: I reject the notion that fashion journalism is completely unrelated to other forms of journalism. These professions share a common core, and the actions discussed in this twitter thread show the person in question completely missing that core.

[something2]

I mean she's a journalist, but not all journalist sign up for in-the-trenches investigations. I doubt anyone here would expect Marques Brownlee to write about a terrorist attack and be disappointed he didn't try to find his way past police barriers.

[bastawhiz]

But she didn't even have to do in-the-trenches investigations. Like you said: you wished she had written more about fashion in the context of the attack. She didn't. She wasn't looking at how people dressed or how they used their clothes after the attack. She really didn't even try. The best she did was note that the stores on Fifth Avenue were closed before describing an expensive limo ride. I would bet that if she hadn't been pressed by her editors, she wouldn't have mentioned 9/11 at all.

To be placed front and center to write one of the most important stories of your career and then do the absolute bare minimum at the behest of your bosses is either laziness, apathy, or profound ignorance.

[Someone]

> She spent most of the time trying to dictate things she'd already written over the phone

Falling back to ingrained habits is quite a normal response to stress. It also is part of why after an emergency landing aircraft passengers may pick up their luggage before getting out of the plane.

I think that also could explain the martini drinking in the limo. That might be the ‘program’ fashion journalists always run when in long limo rides.

As to the entire article: It’s not brilliant writing, but she mentions what she did, show some compassion with the victims, realizes that he drinking wasn’t very appropriate, and concludes that fashion may never be the same.

I don’t see that as being reason to vilify her.

That may even have been the brief she got from her editor.