That's how journalists used to sneak their opinion into otherwise factual reporting. WSJ still has enough old-school editors that Tripp Mickle couldn't go full WaPo or NYT and write a pure opinion page rant, so he used a factual statement to thinly veil his opinion.

Good journalism is more than just fact regurgitation.

Correct. It's the distillation of those facts into something digestible, and provide a bit of an angle to it.

It is certainly not the breathless pearl clutching which has taken over the NYT and WaPo (amongst others).

That is not a good defense of covertly editorializing in an opinion piece.

Great journalism is more than just fact regurgitation. But most modern journalism would be improved if it was replaced with fact regurgitation because most journalists cannot distinguish between their opinion and objective beyond-the-facts reporting.

Good journalism is also more than just low-key denigrating a man for being a mechanical engineer with an M.B.A.

It hit me that way, too. Gruber recently wrote:

> I don’t worry that Apple is in trouble because Jony Ive is leaving; I worry that Apple is in trouble because he’s not being replaced.

I think that's spot on. Jobs is dead and Ive checked out. Who's doing the thing that they did, now? I don't want to buy products that are designed by committee.

Agreed, that's the key line that summarizes the whole article: once proud design/tech company turns into operations/finance driven behemoth.