The Devil Wears Prada sold me the journalism fantasy. The sequel captures the unglamorous reality | Patrick Lenton

I don’t know a single journalist my age who hasn’t ricocheted around the rapidly shrinking media industry, through multiple buyouts, redundancies and pivots to video Many years ago I rage-quit from my editor job at a digital youth media publication. It was the beginning of the pandemic, my team had been slashed to an exhausted handful who cried every morning, and my freelance budget had been cut to zero – all while I was still expected to reach traffic targets. A spree of insane business decisions were made that trickled down to me like sewage water at a music festival. So I quit. I was tired and being overly dramatic of course, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t justified in being upset. They announced that they were selling the publication only two weeks later, which explained basically everything. Like many elder millennial journalists, I was sold a particular, rose-tinted version of what working in media would entail. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones, even the titular Sally from When Harry Met Sally all poisoned my weak developing brain with a fantasy of wearing cute blazers and smoking cigarettes in my apartment and writing silly little stories that somehow saved the day. No movie e