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@h2o
As one of the handful of hacks that are on this board, could I point out that very often the journalist in question will not' actually have had much choice about the article subject, will very often have been given a line to follow, and to be fair probably wants to get the piece out of the way asap so that they can spend more time crafting something that they think is actually going to advance their career.
From what I can tell about this Sophia Diogo Mateus, she graduated from a journalism MA at some point over the last year and so is probably a trainee at the Telegraph, and as such is probably still full of dreams about writing stories of massive social import rather than writing up puff pieces about gold-plated bikes.
And yes, the chances are that she knows nothing about the subculture beyond a press release sent to her by the insurance company and a quick bit of googling for 'colour'.
Given that average wages for placements at the broadsheets are usually next to nothing (as in, they'll give you a couple of quid for your train fare and a sandwich - maybe £100 a week if you're lucky) - or if she's not on a placement the chances are the wages are sub-£15k for a trainee - that she probably had a bunch of other stuff to write, some prima donna editors to run around after and whatever bureaucratic crap people at the Telegraph had to deal with - to expect her to have spent anything more than an hour or two doing background is completely unrealistic.
Granted, there's a lot of crap that the mainstream media is responsible for, particularly at the red-tops, so I'm not going to claim that every journalist is a saint.
But you all seem to think that we're all investigative journalists, paid to sit around in bars chewing the cud with people until we've got the 'real' story. Maybe some of you have seen All the President's Men and not realised that within that two hours of film they've compressed 7 months of chasing a single story - and that they've cut out the 90% of those 7 months when the two journalists were working on stuff that had nothing to do with Watergate.
The reality is that we're paid to process information very, very quickly and write it up accessibly, not to dig or pontificate (though many of us would like to do much more of the latter, to the extent of working on long features in our spare time in the hope that it'll push our careers to a place where we can do more thinking and less regurgitating).
If any of you were to point out that there was a deep systemic malaise in the industry whereby accuracy, depth and understanding have been forced out in favour of speed, spin and producing content at the lowest possible cost, I'd agree wholeheartedly with you and lament what feels very like the long slow death throes of my industry. I'd deplore the messy, unpleasant and sometimes unethical compromises that tight deadlines and tighter budgets have forced upon us, and I'd share a toast to the long-gone ideal of journalism as the fourth estate, the institution that was supposed to speak truth to power and all that jazz.
But please guys - just lay off the journalists. It's very rarely their fault. Blame their editors, or blame the industry - but these personal attacks on individual journalists are really quite unfair.