10 ms·

We need a new model for tech journalism

• Mr_Miner 8y ago
  To present the truth as it is.
• larrik 8y ago
  "The result is the big four tech giants have a head start of 25 or more years in building their business models and laying their groundwork ahead of receiving serious scrutiny" Except that Google isn't quite 20, and Facebook is like 15. Amazon is almost 25. Meanwhile Apple is what? 40+?
  • jdoliner 8y ago
    I'm not sure why this author thinks this is because of the way tech is covered and not just the way business in general, and particularly tech businesses work. Seems a very self centered view of the world.
• fhood 8y ago
  I guess I agree, but covering companies like Google or Amazon or Apple or whatever, no longer feels like "tech" journalism. It isn't niche or easily categorized anymore. It is just journalism. Much like covering Exxon isn't "energy" journalism. I don't feel "whiplashed" by the shift in coverage, I just feel like people now care about these companies whereas 10 years ago they weren't that important. The coverage that Google currently gets feels much like the coverage that Microsoft was receiving in the 90s and early to mid 2000s. There hasn't been a shift really, just Microsoft was relevant earlier.
• mc32 8y ago
  I’d love to see a tech news mag that covered tech the way “The Microprocessor Report” covered microprocessors. Tech news today is more like TMZ for the tech industry and all about either “coolness” or about “causes”.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • ghaff 8y ago
    There are still some pretty good tech news sites out there. The Next Platform and The New Stack are examples of sites that are pretty much just focused on tech news. But most of the organizations that can afford to cover tech news in-depth that may not be of that much interest to the general reader are behind (expensive) paywalls. They're analysts/consultants/etc. (As the Linley Group is with Microprocessor Report.)
  • duxup 8y ago
    Amen "Phone manufacturer X should be embarrassed for putting a notch on their phone!!!" What does that even mean... it's a phone....
    • Nasrudith 8y ago
      It means that it is considered a sign of shoddy design. Granted it is technically a matter of opinion of if having a screen flanking the camera or giving its own space above or below is better but there have been complaints about comparability being broken. Like complaining about a release crashing as breaking the build being unprofessional - while testing is a role internally it should compile and run at least beforehand. Meanwhile 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7 catches fire' is objectively bad since a phone should never catch fire on its own unless perhaps it includes a self destruct feature (which needless to say would be very niche to be approved for sale).
• cosinetau 8y ago
  What is game journalism doing right [if anything] that tech journalism can borrow or learn from?
  • CM30 8y ago
    Not much. That field's arguably got even more problems, and takes the fanboyism and cheerleader attitude thing even further than the tech news sites do. And that's not even getting into the questionable level of research involved, which often means 'treating random people posting rumours on social media as reliable sources'.
  • gipp 8y ago
    It's very strange to me how many people on the Internet constantly want to talk about "games journalism", which seems like an extremely niche area. So many very strong opinions about something that... really doesn't matter? I feel like there's more games journalism journalism than just games journalism, and I cannot even begin to approach an explanation of why that is.
    • WalterGR 8y ago
      "games journalism", which seems like an extremely niche area. Gaming is huge. Absolutely huge. Why do you think that games journalism is not only niche, but extremely niche? I feel like there's more games journalism journalism than just games journalism, ?
      • kentm 8y ago
        > Why do you think that games journalism is not only niche, but extremely niche? I can't really speak to whether or not its niche in an objective sense (i.e. the readership of games journalism), but it may seem that way because the stakes are so low. Games are essentially just entertainment and the availability of accurate information about them is not nearly as important as information about the functioning of government or the actions of large companies that can impact your life.
    • woolvalley 8y ago
• joshvm 8y ago
  > To even visit the offices of tech giants—itself often a rare privilege—requires journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements. Why is it weird that journalists have to sign an NDA to visit premises? Your job is explicitly to spread information and you're visiting a commercially sensitive area. I've worked with small companies (< 30 people) where entire floors were off limits if you didn't sign. It's easy for a journalist to describe something without realising its importance within the community. There was an article recently about a tour of a Nikon lens factory and they were forbidden to talk or describe certain furnaces. If you weren't an expert in glass manufacture, you might let slip a key fact like "we saw a big machine before process Y" or "the glass at this point is red hot" (maybe everyone else has it orange-hot). Why should any corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • eli 8y ago
    The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour. Every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document. I've declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn't like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.
    • JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing.
      • romwell 8y ago
        >Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing. Um, you seem to have missed this part: >The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour. See, there's more stuff in the NDA than what common sense dictates. You can't just agree to the parts you don't have problem with.
• carapace 8y ago
  Blank page with JS disabled.
  • CaptSpify 8y ago
    I have JS disabled and it loads just fine
    • carapace 8y ago
      Are you sure? Dunno what to tell you. I see a blank page with a reddish orange bar at the top. If I enable a few JS sources I get the content, revoke them and it goes away. I'll beef hooked if I'm going to read an article about what "tech journalism" needs from a site that already shit the bed IMO.
• CM30 8y ago
  This article seems like it could be describing games journalism almost perfectly, with the sole exception of the whole 'their business affects every aspect of society' thing. In that field you've also got: 1. Reporters acting more like cheerleaders for industry figures than journalists 2. Overly secretive companies with strict control structures. 3. Journalists being stretched thin as they're forced to cover too many stories at once in too many areas without getting the time to research them properly. 4. A lack of coverage regarding actual issues in the industry, or anything resembling investigative journalism. 5. Misunderstanding their audience in general. But hey, I guess you could say many of the issues are really true of most niche or entertainment focused media.
  • vkou 8y ago
    Gaming journalists understand their audience. The problem is that their bills are paid by advertisements from AAA studios. You've described the problems of ad-sponsored media. If you actually paid for your news, all these problems would go away.
    • CM30 8y ago
      > If you actually paid for your news, all these problems would go away. We all did. They were called magazines, and you paid for subscriptions. There were gaming magazines, tech magazines, music and TV magazines, celebrity gossip magazines, etc. Most of them had many of the same issues as modern sites for those topics.
      • ghaff 8y ago
        That’s because the subscription basically paid for mailing you a paper copy. Everything else was still covered by advertising.
        • Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
          Some magazines but certainly not all. The publisher I worked for most recently had three sister titles: one entirely ad-funded, another entirely subscription-funded (no ads at all), the third (which I edited) half and half.
• fullshark 8y ago
  Journalists can get charmed just like us normals. Their main bias is they are constantly in search of narratives and aim to frame information in that way (cause it makes their pieces interesting). "This tech will change the world" is an exciting narrative that a lot of journalists are more than willing to write a piece around.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    That's true but the bigger issue with a lot of trade press is that there's expected to produce a lot of pieces quickly, often across a rather broad range of topics. The better journalists still do a pretty good job of it; I'm constantly impressed with how much readable and, as far as I can tell even in areas I know a fair bit about, accurate prose some turn out. But you're not going to get much truly investigative journalism out of people who are on the hook for 2 or 3 stories per day. There are also often incentives to be provocative rather than "just the facts." But that's another issue related to incentives.
• thinkingkong 8y ago
  PR. PR drives the news cycle for tech companies. Hell. If you pop the hood and start to dig into most stories, lots of journalists dont even write them. They’re just written by agencies who pitch and pass on pre-drafted content
• repolfx 8y ago
  It's nice to see journalists actually reflecting on how to make journalism better for once. Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. But it's kind of a weird and poorly constructed argument: It’s easy to see why some readers would feel whiplashed by the current, critical coverage of Facebook and Google, which seems to come out of nowhere. Whiplash ... came out of nowhere ... so journalists changed their view too fast then. Next sentence: That’s our fault as journalists: We’ve been too slow to spot how things have changed Wait, did journalists change their views on tech too fast or too slow? It seems to be both at once in this paragraph. Later he appears to lament the historical dearth of "serious tech journalists", but he defines serious as journalists that "hold tech to account" which in turn simply seems to mean attacking them because they're big. I guess I'd use a definition more like "understands technology", with Jon Stokes at Ars Technica being a good example. We do need a new model for tech journalism and indeed all journalism - we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy. Given the contents of this essay I'm not holding my breath.
  • chickenfries 8y ago
    > Sometimes I wonder if engineers and doctors are the only profession that constantly hold conferences and write blog posts about how to become better at their jobs. Journalists are literally doing this all the time. What makes you think that engineers and doctors are the only people who have conferences? Also, if we're talking about industry, most tech conferences are hardly very self-critical (this is changing at some conferences) most are about selling products to developers / other people in the tech industry or self-promotion and recruiting.
    • repolfx 8y ago
      Can you show me where to find conference papers written by journalists on how to do journalism better? I thought maybe the site hosting this article was one, but it appears to not be the case judging from the contents (it may think it is).
  • 8y ago
• OliverJones 8y ago
  News flash! Some journalists are lazy, just parroting press releases! Video at 11! Still, the Columbia Journalism Review is right about the need to rethink how news outlets cover "tech." Too much tech journalism fills space and time with breathless playback of the founding myths of companies, or breathless coverage of scandals. The big Sili Valley companies are big enough to deserve the same kind of journalist scrutiny as outfits like GM, Proctor&Gamble, and Cargill. Some business journalists specialize in finance, while others specialize in product, distribution, employment, regulatory, and the like. It certainly makes sense for some to specialize in software and telecom, but those fields apply to Cargill just as much as they apply to Google or the stealth startup in the incubator. It's common for business journalists to accept embargos on stories, holding off publication until a certain, and near, date. This is quid pro quo for early access. But the moment they accept long term confidential disclosure agreements is the moment they stop being journalists. If we don't want our trade secrets in the media, we should not show them to journalists.
• nemild 8y ago
  I write a media literacy guide for engineers: https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/blob/master/READM... The key thing this post is missing, is it talks about this as journalists could do better, as if these issues are simply a moral failing. Instead, the key issue is reader and economic incentives (like how tech journalism monetizes through conferences — and the importance of page views and virality). Here's Nick Bilton talking about the things that influence tech journalists: >“It’s a game of access, and if you don’t play it carefully, you may pay sorely. Outlets that write negatively about gadgets often don’t get pre-release versions of the next gadget. Writers who ask probing questions may not get to interview the C.E.O. next time he or she is doing the rounds. If you comply with these rules, you’re rewarded with page views and praise in the tech blogosphere. And then there’s the fact that many of these tech outlets rely so heavily on tech conferences. “If you look at most tech publications, they have major conferences as their revenue,” Jason Calacanis, the blogger and founder of Weblogs, told me. “If you hit too hard, you lose keynotes, ticket buyers, and support in the tech space.”" https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/theranos-silicon-valley-media https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/theranos-silicon-val...
  • arcbyte 8y ago
    If saying things is your business and people don't like what youre saying, youre bad at business and dont belong in business.
• textmode 8y ago
  Heres an MP3 of the Kara Swisher interview that is mentioned. https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/episodes/1454f1b6-4ad7-4e3b-8342-e35a555d4bd3/25023ab20cd98b78ca1e6b1d388fd34124cdfad061ac8483aee685a990bc7a0bb14866370f071f3eea90eeaad9b41b5bc95969fe912fefbade2bc456c66a7107/RecodeDecode_180718_MarkZuckerberg_MIX01.mp3 https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/episodes/1454f1b6-4...
• klondike_ 8y ago
  Tech journalism, especially in mainstream publications, has gotten notably worse in the past few decades. A lot of times it reads more like an advertisement than actual journalism, with journalists doing little research of their own (See articles covering solar roadways, and other infeasible ideas). It might just be nostalgia goggles but I remember magazines like Popular Mechanics and Wired going into intricate detail whenever they reviewed or covered a product. Graphics and charts explaining how exactly things worked, instead of just regurgitating the company's "about" page.
  • AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    I'd say that all journalism has gotten notably worse in the past few decades. We may just notice it more in tech journalism because we know more about tech.
  • notatoad 8y ago
    >A lot of times it reads more like an advertisement than actual journalism that's because a lot of it is advertisement. Paid posts are rampant, but so is lazy "journalists" simply copy and pasting press releases, maybe re-wording a couple phrases to make it seem like their own writing.
• motohagiography 8y ago
  Tech has the same problem entertainment and fashion reporters always had. The CJR appears to agree that most tech writers are hacks trading fluff jobs for access, swag, and perks.
• grosjona 8y ago
  >> That’s our fault as journalists: We’ve been too slow to spot how things have changed and to cover the sector as the corporate behemoth it is Journalists were very happy to help Facebook while it was profitable for them and now that Facebook has obviously turned against them, suddenly they have a moral epiphany. I wonder if the journalists who lined their pockets by promoting certain startups while working for tech publications like TechCrunch, Venture Beat and the others will also have a similar moral epiphany some day... Probably not.
• Nasrudith 8y ago
  The article doesn't seem that good but really I think the state of journalism in general is that it is an ungainly hybrid trying to serve two masters and failing to serve either. As a business they face declining revenues and as a source of information they face increased competition from non-journalistic sources and frankly often aren't very good. Activists don't have the business as the issue but they have their own axe to grind and everyone knows it and reacts accordingly which ironically limits their ability to influence - people either sign on at referral and follow until alienated or ignore them if they aren't interested. I suspect that they are largely mis-motivated as part of the issue - one doesn't become a music star just by wanting to be famous yet they are focused the most on clicks. Similar to how just having as a goal to sleep with people isn't a very good approach to being sexually desirable. Some real soul searching would be needed to rise to the top again - a fundamental desire to inform people first and then financial success may follow ironically if they don't care about it. I doubt that the existing institutions are capable of it because they are fundamentally businesses and asking them to stop caring about profit is about as absurd as asking a peasant to stop caring about food.
• ewjordan 8y ago
  There are dedicated reporters at a lot of outlets for each of the tech giants, I don't understand that complaint. I've talked with several of them, they show up at like every tech gathering they're allowed into, and many people at those companies know their names/faces and avoid them like the plague.