I’m Rachel Ensign, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. I’m looking to connect with folks in the EA community who crossed paths with Sam Bankman-Fried and thought this forum may be a good place to find them.
If you fit that bill, please feel free to reach out. My contact information is 917-769-0847 or rachel.ensign@wsj.com.
Rachel
A reminder to all that the Community Health team at CEA offers support and guidance for responding to media enquiries, and can be contacted by at media@centreforeffectivealtruism.org
Rachel, they also might be a helpful place to start for your enquiry.
You might want to try tracking down the people who participated in the FTX EA fellowship program, FTX advertised it in 2021 here:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sdjcH7KAxgB328RAb/ftx-ea-fellowships/
Thank you so much for sharing this. Do you know if anyone actually wound up participating in the program and how I might find who they were?
To the rest of the forum:
I strongly recommend people on the EA forum do not downvote outsiders, especially an actual WSJ journalist writing a story about EA, unless they actually post content that violate forum norms or rules.
With less intensity, we should discourage the framing of "auditing" very established journalists for red flags, or create "whitelists" for such. There are situations this is valid (but not for the WSJ!). This is hard to calibrate and communicate.
Zooming out, there's a lot of say here about the voting and forum. There's this "beauty contest" that exists mainly inside the heads of a few on this forum. This behavior is entirely transparent and probably will backfire.
Why? If I was making a decision to be interviewed by Rachel or not, probably the top thing I'd be worried about is whether they've previously written not-very-journalistic hit pieces on tech-y people (which is not all critical pieces in general! some are pretty good and well researched). I agree that there's such thing as going too far, but I don't think my comment was doing that.
I think "there are situations this is valid (but not for the WSJ!)" is wrong? There have been tons of examples of kind of crap articles in usually highly credible newspapers. For example, this article in the NYT seemed to be pretty wrong and not that good.
Why do people disagree with this comment so much? It's sitting at -11, but strikes me as a pretty valid contribution.
As far as I understand, almost no-one who participated in the FTX EA fellowship program "crossed paths with Sam Bankman-Fried"