If the people from the magazine really threw away all their work because the guy wasn't the "archetypal Black entrepreneur to hang the story around".... that's quite sad?

I mean, they have a journalist shadow the guy for two months, and then they decide that the material doesn't fit their story and they toss it?

Shouldn't it be the other way around? Do the research first, write the story afterwards?

I worry that a lot of journalism really suffers from this. The magazine has an idea what kind of story they want to write, and then they look for sources / people / material that corroborates their story.

That won't lead to stories representative of the real world...