Oh no no no, it's better than that. That "rando" Noah Berlatsky is an actual journalist (or at least what passes for one in 2018 ) who's written for a lot of major online publications. Jake just had a brush with an actual professional connection and whiffed it because he's so bad at writing.
If Jake weren't so incompetent at the thing he claims to have spent most of his adult life doing, he could have parlayed this into a citation in The Atlantic, Slate, Huffington Post, or the like.
People like Berlatsky are the people Jake should be sucking up to - and then impressing with solid, professional work - if he wants to turn his internet life into a journalism career. They're adjacent to the lunatic fringe of SJW, but are not themselves too fringe for mainstream lefty publications.
That's just it, though. Jakey doesn't
want the career in professional journalism. He wants the career in Regessive Left hack journalism. He's been surrounded by idiots who write their own Googleshngs, and see varying levels of success for it. What Jake doesn't get (aside from the fact that
fucking nobody likes Regressive Left hack journalism) is two critical components of it, which Jake hasn't picked up on because he's a willfully ignorant piece of shit.
1. The ones that actually get paid are few and far between. Every website that covers Social Justice has hundreds of overglorified bloggers that think they're fucking geniuses because they know how to string together a sentence and speak talking points and get paid shit, if they get paid at all. Even Katherine Cross has been forced to e-beg from time to time, further demonstrating that this field just isn't the financial jet-setter Jake thinks it is. The professional con-artists, like Quinn, get their financial fortune because they're sociopaths and able to use people like Jake to devastating effect. Jake, being Jake, doesn't see this.
2. Do you know why Regressive Left hack Journalism gained prominence? It wasn't initially due to politics, but economics. The politics came
later. Clickbait journalism meant that outrage stories directed towards women tended to foster more clicks, and, in turn, bring in more revenue. However, the Clickbait journalist model's been an economic loser for a few years now due to the backlash against zero-effort shit sites and adblock.
Short version is that Jake's chasing a model that's been dead for about 3 years (and GG had a
direct hand in helping kill off), and is one SJW in a gigantic stack of SJWs competing for the same jobs with the same qualifications - only Jake is less talented, has a smaller portfolio of work, and has, for all intents and purposes, been exposed as a filthy heterosexual white male. He will never get a job and never be hired.