I’m an ex-sports journalist for local and regional outlets, and the journalism field in general is littered, top to bottom, with wannabe heroes, world-changers, etc. Some local sports journalists aren’t like that, they just want to go fishing in their off hours, but some are as you describe and definitely 95 percent of hard news / community writers are wannabe heroes.

I decided journalism had jumped the shark for me when I was working for a small paper with four total writers and I realized I was the only one of the four who didn’t have either a substack, a political podcast, or both. These subs and pods had like 12 followers, but the other three writers all thought they were just temporarily covering local news to pay the bills until they were able to build a political commentary brand and do that full time. …I just wanted to tell people how the basketball team was doing. I didn’t fit in.