There are still a few authors worth reading on Ars. Beth Mole has a loyal following for a reason-- her stories are interesting, engaging, and never fail to make me squirm with horror. Jonathan Gitlin has a tendency to drop into the forum to snipe at comments he does not like, and I have no interest in supercars, but by and large his automobile reporting is interesting. And if you like anything rocket related, Eric Berger is clearly passionate about the industry. There are a few other folks who are hit-or-miss like most journalists. I've found that Benj is mostly misses, and although I am always interested in what John Timmer writes about, I cannot seem to interpret his writing style. In general I skip the syndicated articles from Wired, etc, because they are either "nothings" or bad.
I think Dan Goodin sometimes writes deep analysis of security attacks, although his recent articles len towards surface level news stories that you can find everywhere.
Here's a recent Jonathan Gitlin piece that I found particularly egregious: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/01/exclusive-volvo-tells-u...
Absolutely zero discussion of why this might be a bad idea. It's not journalism, it's advertising.