I don't think investigative journalism is actually useful if it's purely negative; if you can't tell the difference between a journalist and a teenager with oppositional defiant disorder, why believe the story? And to investigate, they actually need good sources, but tech people who would be the sources mainly seem to believe NYT writers don't know what they're talking about.

Although in this case, the NYT wasn't doing "investigative journalism", Matt is talking about a literal actual editorial mandate to write negative stories.

https://twitter.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192

I think the one I remember is when they wrote a story about LinkedIn doing unauthorized human experiments on the newsfeed, by which they meant A/B tests.