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.

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?

> 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.