{"id":433009,"date":"2026-08-14T18:40:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T18:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/433009\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T18:40:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T18:40:11","slug":"this-blackrock-analyst-wants-to-fix-journalism-step-one-skip-the-journalists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/433009\/","title":{"rendered":"This BlackRock analyst wants to fix journalism. Step one? Skip the journalists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Published Aug. 14, 2026at6:00am<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-block break-words article-body text-left\">The person behind the person behind <a href=\"https:\/\/thedissentsf.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">The Dissent (opens in new tab)<\/a>, a 5-month-old San Francisco newsroom \u201cstaffed\u201d by AI agents, is Maddie Frost. She\u2019s the girlfriend of Dakota Carrasco, a 27-year-old BlackRock \u201cportfolio specialist\u201d who\u2019s listed as the founder and publisher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-block break-words article-body text-left\">Frost, who works in finance, cheerfully said she hoped the story would make The Dissent \u201cgo viral\u201d during Carrasco\u2019s photo shoot for The Standard earlier this month. She\u2019s been largely bankrolling the operation since they moved to San Francisco from Albuquerque a year ago and spent much of the shoot stage-managing to make sure Carrasco\u2019s best angles were lit. She declined to be photographed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-block break-words article-body text-left\">Carrasco\u2019s own account of the project is more high-minded. He says The Dissent, was inspired by news deserts and the amount of local information young voters get from Instagram instead of legitimate news operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-block break-words article-body text-left\">The Bay Area is hardly a news desert; San Francisco alone has 35 publications covering local news, according to Northwestern University\u2019s Local News Initiative.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published Aug. 14, 2026at6:00am The person behind the person behind The Dissent (opens in new tab), a 5-month-old&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,101,103,102,104,106,105,8170],"class_list":["post-433009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news","tag-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}