51 ms·

Tech journalism is less diverse than tech (2020)

258 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

cuzBchain 5y ago
The only tech writing worth reading is technical. Everything else is traditional gossip based hype generation. Not a shock it’s a bunch of white people hyping America's financial economic hustle.
jquery 5y ago
It’s worth noting nobody found his data worth publishing. So we have to take his word for it. And surprise, the blog is full of right-wing propaganda. So of course HN signal-boosts it. Color me skeptical.
secondaryacct 5y ago
I'd be curious how they define race. Do they have a rule book with color pigment density, size of external attributes and maybe even a grading scale of good to bad "diversity factor"? I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity. What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be more worried if all journalists are students of the same school of thought than if they were all blue-skinned. And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D And when the government in China asked me my "self reported racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...
- flowerbeater 5y ago
  I think the fundamental question that everyone avoids answering is whether it's possible to tell race from appearance. If the answer is yes, then there should be some specific unspoken criteria that exists, so what are they? If no, then how do people tell whether a panel is diverse, or a class or company is diverse, when it's not self-reported?
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  There's obviously not a perfect definition of race, but it's also obvious that many news orgs are, by basically any definition, very disproportionally white compared to the racial markup (however you decide to define that) of their candidate pool.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Is there any definition of race, other than “human”, where the authors point changes in correctness or lack thereof?
  - nverno 5y ago
    Yes, a common conception of race is nation/region/tribe- eg. Trojan, Roman, Mongol, or the various SA tribes. So, a modern US-centric version could be the state you are from, or rural/urban, etc. It's meaningless, though, unless society adopts the concept, and given the worldview nowadays it's hard to imagine anything more granular than continental origin gaining traction (at least in US).
- nverno 5y ago
  I think of race as an ideology- different groups seem to have roughly similar views about it when they have shared history- it's a social construct, so it's difficult/impossible to really convey to other people what it means to someone. For example, the concepts of white/black races seem to have originated in the US somewhere around 1700 [1], and are noticeably absent from older writings. For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent. The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to interpret literally. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevance/dp/1622127226/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+birth+of+a+white+nation&qid=1637358204&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevanc...
grenoire 5y ago
Isn't it a luxury to be able to put down money for a journalism degree tuition in the US? I think this may already be explained quite well for the US higher education system, how do these ratios compare to journalism degrees'?
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  The luxury is more in the post-college pipeline.
- ghaff 5y ago
  A journalism degree is by no means a pre-requisite to working as a journalist. In fact, a fair number of people would argue it's a negative relative to real-world experience. I'm not sure any of the working tech journalists I know have a J-school degree.
  - brabel 5y ago
    How do they become journalists? Straight out of high school? Or there are non-university shorter courses they need to take? I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite scary to me.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      By journalism degree/J-school, I was referring to the (essentially) masters degree in journalism that universities like Columbia offer. The more typical route in my experience is that people get some sort of liberal arts undergrad degree like English, communications, or journalism (not sure how common this is as an undergrad major). Though you also get journalists with various science or engineering degrees who end up gravitating to science reporting. In many cases, people going into journalism have worked on the school paper. I'm guessing straight out of high school is uncommon these days; I assume "apprenticeships" are rare though poorly paid/unpaid internships may be less so. There is also a lot of movement in and out of journalism (though mostly out these days) to a variety of other fields that involve a lot of writing such as IT industry analysts and content teams at companies. But in general my experience is that journalism doesn't especially gatekeep by credentials (though it does by connections to a non-trivial degree). And a lot of working tech professionals publish blogs etc. in various online tech pubs. For a number of years I had one when CNET used to have a whole external blog network.These days I write for TechTarget every now and then as well as a couple of sites my company sponsors. There are some bad examples of this but it's widespread. Papers like the NYT segregate external content more carefully.
orangepurple 5y ago
"Anti" racists are professional victims. Don't engage with them. They will always find a way to twist a disagreement going against their favor into an oppression narrative.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  Yeah in France where I was born, which is no perfect by any means of course, we tend to call the american obsession with racial segmentation "racialism" and consider it just as bad as racism. Like racism is to grade races when racialism is to accept humanity can be segmented is such races, which we strongly deny as a nation, or so I was raised to believe (but again no lessons to give, we have issues in France)
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
      > From what I've read, the racism in France is quite bad Links
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Clubs-accused-of-racism-at-door https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Clubs-accused-of-rac... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/sports/psg-racial-profiling.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/sports/psg-racial-profili... https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.39/ https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.39/
        NikolaeVarius 5y ago
        Several isolated incidents does not make a larger problem
gonehome 5y ago
Somewhat related tweet thread from today: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth). You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don’t anymore. We don’t need them. If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at the NYT is night and day.
- ravenstine 5y ago
  "Don't talk to cops" is a popular idea, but nobody thinks the same of journalists even though most are effectively undercover idea-police for the establishment. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you by a journalist at no potential benefit to you. At best, they won't fuck up your public image.
- morelisp 5y ago
  Haha, you're all so fucking angry you don't have breathless useful idiots like Wu, Scoble, Kelly, Swisher, or Shirky dominating the tech press anymore. It's precious!
  - gonehome 5y ago
    Swisher was hardly positive tech press. I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition now with people that can own their own distribution and aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece. The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
    - morelisp 5y ago
havkd 5y ago
Does “white” include “Jewish”? :’)
- oogali 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  For white jews, yes?
- dang 5y ago
  Since whatever your problem with Jews is is showing up again, I've banned this account. You can't do this here.
brabel 5y ago
Currently, the USA population is 60.4% white [1]. So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general?? [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...
- cuzBchain 5y ago
  Because it’s low effort work that doesn’t require real manual labor. Anglo-gibberish is great for generating semantic nonsense and given the US is 9th in reading education, 31st in math, you expect these dim white people to work when they can generate cognitive noise to stay busy? Their dad owns a dealership and their mom is on a school PTA. They’re better than work. It’s has nothing to do with data and the emotional entitlement.
- awillen 5y ago
  Much, much smaller population. From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications." It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I think it is more that industries that rely heavily on actual productivity/measurable competency are going to lean more heavily on the immigrant population because domestic STEM education largely seems to suck. It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.
mactavish88 5y ago
Focusing on such statistics usually encourages equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity. A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but can’t, along with the various factors that are preventing them from getting into their desired profession. If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc., you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at institutional bias, but there’s still no way to prove causation with just that data. You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are that’re faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do something about those specific obstacles.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true.
  - xondono 5y ago
    > if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true. Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The point is that you can’t see equality of opportunity by looking at the output.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I think a good baseline is similar levels of innate interest. The fact that the output is so skewed seems to logically suggest some issue with equality of opportunity?
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I agree it suggests that possibility. Now what? IMO, you have to look deeper to try to understand the drivers of the suggested inequality for fixing the drivers is what fixes the system. What are the filters or moments that create skew between interest and eventual accomplishment? How do we remove/reduce them?
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity. I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible. My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  This hits the nail on the head. All of my friends who are in the process of becoming journalists have to spend tons of time working unpaid shitty internships just to get a low paying bottom rung job. The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often both. This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large - most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have rich parents.
  - dahfizz 5y ago
    The cause is pretty obvious: journalists and other humanities do not pay well. People are not willing to pay for the garbage modern journalists put out, so there is not much money in the field. The only people going into the field, therefore, are those who are independently rich (rich parents) and ideologically motivated (which further reduces the quality of modern journalism).
    - goatlover 5y ago
      Sounds like a problem with politicians as well, particularly beyond the local level.
adwn 5y ago
Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why
- throwaway2077 5y ago
  >without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics" in the sense that it's one group saying they want more resources than they have. Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them. I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation. It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it all." "our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc. Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.
Fordec 5y ago
I would contend that, while a subset, GAMMA companies != all tech companies as the headline implies
- xondono 5y ago
  Off topic, but I feel obligated to comment each time I see the “GAMMA” acronym. We either change according to parent company, and then we need to take the G and put an A. Or we don’t and leave the F. GAMMA makes no sense.
  - akavi 5y ago
    FAANG started as a stock ticker acronym. Facebook's stock ticker's now $mtvs, Google's is still $goog/$googl. That's a justification at least.
ilamont 5y ago
So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications. This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors. The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph? That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there. Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades. Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3). After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to. Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors. At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph? Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.
Traster 5y ago
Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for people that spend so much of their time attacking "the media", this authors would do well to learn something about journalism, and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the author talks about representation and talks about that in terms of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig in to those numbers you find out that basically the reason the big tech companies have a low number of white employees is because they have an enormous over-representation of asian employees. It's all well and good to say "Only 51.7% of employees at Google are white, so clearly we've got great diversity" - but using the same statistics you can also say "93% of the workforce is white or asian and that rises to 95.5% in leadership positions". Sudenly that doens't look so stunning. In fact it almost looks deliberately misleading. Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech journalism. There are just some glaring issues. First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors in the NYT? And if you're grabbing the data from the NYT website, why not just do that over a few years? Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don't like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in publications that aren't listed here - does AnandTech not count as tech journalism now? Let's completely ignore independent journalists shall we? The second list of tech journalists is literally just "We found this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value". Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this study (I think it's frankly just quite shoddy) but a real highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless due to the methodology) and then just start guessing whether they're white. The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this, but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn't even get into the obvious fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism are not the same! We're literally comparing a list of less than 1000 journalists to companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people.
- noslenwerdna 5y ago
  The author calls for tech journals to release their race data. This is why the author has to resort to the approximations you take issue with. "Big Tech Media corporations should do the right thing and release the demographic breakdown of their employee base. There is even a federal requirement to file the form EEO-1 Survey which breaks this data down."
deleted 5y ago
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spamizbad 5y ago
I know two Black technical journalists; they are both blocked by various industry people. Their articles are sourced almost exclusively from investigative reporting/leaks from lower-level employees. Meanwhile super antagonistic while journos will weirdly be omitted from block lists.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Did they publish their articles, though, somewhere at all? I'd love to read a good quality investigative article any day. I couldn't care less about how much melanin the author got, but I like good stories with the "from below" perspective. They are invariably better than the founders/leaders information bubbles a lot of outlets like to fixate upon.
rayiner 5y ago
The HuffPo editorial board is less diverse than the GOP: https://www.mic.com/articles/144177/this-tweet-from-a-huffington-post-editor-shows-the-problem-with-white-feminism https://www.mic.com/articles/144177/this-tweet-from-a-huffin...
AlanYx 5y ago
You see this phenomenon in policy development too. My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though). Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.
joeman1000 5y ago
This graph is bad. It looks like a cumulative frequency graph. It looks more like a sediment analysis.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
truthwhisperer 5y ago
because the quality is not measured on whether you're a male or female but on the number of readers or clicks. Very transparent and very non-discriminatory. We all know woman write differently and generally speaking don't touch the bits and bytes but more the feelings/humanity behind. For example, questions like does a chip have feelings or what about this twin brother does he feel lonely
mayli 5y ago
How about NBA is less diverse than tech?
johncessna 5y ago
This is a great example of fitting data to your conclusion. You're comparing the entire population of employees of major tech companies against specific journalists. Why not compare the entire companies? Also the idea that diversity at a big tech companies is an indication of diversity in technical fields is just wrong.
civilized 5y ago
Oh, the people who criticize everyone else are hypocrites? Really?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Why did they choose "white" as a measurement of diversity? I think if they had chosen "Asian", the graph would show an opposite picture: lower diversity at tech than in writers.

258 points by 1cvmask 5y ago

The only tech writing worth reading is technical. Everything else is traditional gossip based hype generation. Not a shock it’s a bunch of white people hyping America's financial economic hustle.

jquery 5y ago

It’s worth noting nobody found his data worth publishing. So we have to take his word for it. And surprise, the blog is full of right-wing propaganda. So of course HN signal-boosts it. Color me skeptical.

secondaryacct 5y ago

I'd be curious how they define race. Do they have a rule book with color pigment density, size of external attributes and maybe even a grading scale of good to bad "diversity factor"? I find it more disturbing they consider diversity on a pseudo scientific race definition than the supposed lack of diversity. What if in those they call white, many are women, many are young or old, fulltime or partime, idealists or pragmatists, some kind of attributes that could actually matter for writing ? I d be more worried if all journalists are students of the same school of thought than if they were all blue-skinned. And I say that myself as a minority where I am (happen to be white-skinned western europe pigment variant, italian hair-colored, northern continental medium sized, but live and work in China...) where Im still probably graded as part of a non diverse "race" in my company's corporate diversity index :D And when the government in China asked me my "self reported racial origin" last census, I said "Other: Normandy", not sure what exactly they want to mean by "westerner" as opposed to "vietnamese" in the multiple choice combo box...

flowerbeater 5y ago
I think the fundamental question that everyone avoids answering is whether it's possible to tell race from appearance. If the answer is yes, then there should be some specific unspoken criteria that exists, so what are they? If no, then how do people tell whether a panel is diverse, or a class or company is diverse, when it's not self-reported?
agentdrtran 5y ago
There's obviously not a perfect definition of race, but it's also obvious that many news orgs are, by basically any definition, very disproportionally white compared to the racial markup (however you decide to define that) of their candidate pool.
endisneigh 5y ago
Is there any definition of race, other than “human”, where the authors point changes in correctness or lack thereof?
- nverno 5y ago
  Yes, a common conception of race is nation/region/tribe- eg. Trojan, Roman, Mongol, or the various SA tribes. So, a modern US-centric version could be the state you are from, or rural/urban, etc. It's meaningless, though, unless society adopts the concept, and given the worldview nowadays it's hard to imagine anything more granular than continental origin gaining traction (at least in US).
nverno 5y ago
I think of race as an ideology- different groups seem to have roughly similar views about it when they have shared history- it's a social construct, so it's difficult/impossible to really convey to other people what it means to someone. For example, the concepts of white/black races seem to have originated in the US somewhere around 1700 [1], and are noticeably absent from older writings. For some people, skin color is as meaningless as eye color, but for others everything is viewed through the lens of race, so it has the added difficulty that its meaning is context dependent. The racial jargon is often so amorphous, it's impossible to interpret literally. 1. https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevance/dp/1622127226/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+birth+of+a+white+nation&qid=1637358204&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Birth-White-Nation-Invention-Relevanc...

grenoire 5y ago

Isn't it a luxury to be able to put down money for a journalism degree tuition in the US? I think this may already be explained quite well for the US higher education system, how do these ratios compare to journalism degrees'?

whimsicalism 5y ago
The luxury is more in the post-college pipeline.
ghaff 5y ago
A journalism degree is by no means a pre-requisite to working as a journalist. In fact, a fair number of people would argue it's a negative relative to real-world experience. I'm not sure any of the working tech journalists I know have a J-school degree.
- brabel 5y ago
  How do they become journalists? Straight out of high school? Or there are non-university shorter courses they need to take? I always thought that you even had to take an oauth to be a journalist, as the impact of the profession can affect the public opinion and therefore comes with a good amount of responsibility. To think someone without any qualifications can just start writing for credible news outlets seems quite scary to me.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    By journalism degree/J-school, I was referring to the (essentially) masters degree in journalism that universities like Columbia offer. The more typical route in my experience is that people get some sort of liberal arts undergrad degree like English, communications, or journalism (not sure how common this is as an undergrad major). Though you also get journalists with various science or engineering degrees who end up gravitating to science reporting. In many cases, people going into journalism have worked on the school paper. I'm guessing straight out of high school is uncommon these days; I assume "apprenticeships" are rare though poorly paid/unpaid internships may be less so. There is also a lot of movement in and out of journalism (though mostly out these days) to a variety of other fields that involve a lot of writing such as IT industry analysts and content teams at companies. But in general my experience is that journalism doesn't especially gatekeep by credentials (though it does by connections to a non-trivial degree). And a lot of working tech professionals publish blogs etc. in various online tech pubs. For a number of years I had one when CNET used to have a whole external blog network.These days I write for TechTarget every now and then as well as a couple of sites my company sponsors. There are some bad examples of this but it's widespread. Papers like the NYT segregate external content more carefully.

orangepurple 5y ago

"Anti" racists are professional victims. Don't engage with them. They will always find a way to twist a disagreement going against their favor into an oppression narrative.

secondaryacct 5y ago
Yeah in France where I was born, which is no perfect by any means of course, we tend to call the american obsession with racial segmentation "racialism" and consider it just as bad as racism. Like racism is to grade races when racialism is to accept humanity can be segmented is such races, which we strongly deny as a nation, or so I was raised to believe (but again no lessons to give, we have issues in France)
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    > From what I've read, the racism in France is quite bad Links
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Clubs-accused-of-racism-at-door https://www.connexionfrance.com/Archive/Clubs-accused-of-rac... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/sports/psg-racial-profiling.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/sports/psg-racial-profili... https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.39/ https://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.39/
      - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
        Several isolated incidents does not make a larger problem

gonehome 5y ago

Somewhat related tweet thread from today: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1461633512344326146?s=21 Don’t talk to journalists (at least if you work in tech, but probably outside of it) - they’re not your friends and your incentives are not aligned with theirs (and they’re not looking to tell the objective truth). You’re better off writing your own articles about what you’re doing. They historically owned distribution, but they don’t anymore. We don’t need them. If you do want to interview, find a smart individual. Like Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Ben Thompson of Stratechery. The difference in quality between someone like Byrne Hobart, Ben Thompson, Sam Harris, or Scott Alexander compared to someone at the NYT is night and day.

ravenstine 5y ago
"Don't talk to cops" is a popular idea, but nobody thinks the same of journalists even though most are effectively undercover idea-police for the establishment. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you by a journalist at no potential benefit to you. At best, they won't fuck up your public image.
morelisp 5y ago
Haha, you're all so fucking angry you don't have breathless useful idiots like Wu, Scoble, Kelly, Swisher, or Shirky dominating the tech press anymore. It's precious!
- gonehome 5y ago
  Swisher was hardly positive tech press. I'm just glad there's people like Ben Thompson where the quality is so much higher. It's nice to have real competition now with people that can own their own distribution and aren't writing everything as some dumb narrative hit piece. The only ones left at the large orgs when the dust settles will be the mediocre writers targeting engagement via controversy. There's no reason to give them access.
  - morelisp 5y ago

havkd 5y ago

Does “white” include “Jewish”? :’)

oogali 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3cGfrExozQ
whimsicalism 5y ago
For white jews, yes?
dang 5y ago
Since whatever your problem with Jews is is showing up again, I've banned this account. You can't do this here.

brabel 5y ago

Currently, the USA population is 60.4% white [1]. So, whites are under-represented in big tech (50.1% white according to this post) while over-represented significantly in tech journalism (80% white). That's difficult to understand: why is there such a bias in favour of white people in tech jornalism, but not in tech in general?? [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/united-states-po...

cuzBchain 5y ago
Because it’s low effort work that doesn’t require real manual labor. Anglo-gibberish is great for generating semantic nonsense and given the US is 9th in reading education, 31st in math, you expect these dim white people to work when they can generate cognitive noise to stay busy? Their dad owns a dealership and their mom is on a school PTA. They’re better than work. It’s has nothing to do with data and the emotional entitlement.
awillen 5y ago
Much, much smaller population. From OP: " So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications." It's that, vs. the millions of employees in big tech. So first you're dealing with the fact that smaller samples are going to have higher variance. Beyond that, though, since diversity has become important to businesses, tech employment has grown much faster than tech journalism. If you're actively hiring a lot of people, you can shift the mix by bringing in a larger proportion of people that are different than the initial population that you started with. If you're not growing, then that means people have to leave the original population, either by firing or quitting, and then be replaced. The latter takes longer than the former, particularly when you're comparing big tech, which has a huge amount of turnover at a given company, and tech journalism, which has much less.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I think it is more that industries that rely heavily on actual productivity/measurable competency are going to lean more heavily on the immigrant population because domestic STEM education largely seems to suck. It's been my experience in every high-stakes knowledge work job (not journalism) that many of the people I work with are immigrants from the continents of Asia, Europe, and Africa.

mactavish88 5y ago

Focusing on such statistics usually encourages equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity. A far more helpful metric would probably be to know how many people want to be in tech (or tech journalism in this case) but can’t, along with the various factors that are preventing them from getting into their desired profession. If you do then break down the numbers by ethnicity, gender, etc., you may be able to tease out a correlation that may hint at institutional bias, but there’s still no way to prove causation with just that data. You would at least be clearer on the what the obstacles are that’re faced by people, perhaps marginalized people, that put them at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to get into those fields. Then you can proactively and practically start to do something about those specific obstacles.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Can you explain more? It seems like it would only encourage equality of outcome if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true.
- xondono 5y ago
  > if you took the assumption that black people are innately less interested in tech as true. Or maybe more interested but much more discriminated. The point is that you can’t see equality of opportunity by looking at the output.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I think a good baseline is similar levels of innate interest. The fact that the output is so skewed seems to logically suggest some issue with equality of opportunity?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I agree it suggests that possibility. Now what? IMO, you have to look deeper to try to understand the drivers of the suggested inequality for fixing the drivers is what fixes the system. What are the filters or moments that create skew between interest and eventual accomplishment? How do we remove/reduce them?

quadrifoliate 5y ago

Compared to programming and tech, success in a lot of fields in the humanities, including journalism is far more connected to who you know, what family you were born into, what college you went to, and your overall personal network. In such an environment, it is unsurprising that there is a severe lack of diversity. I have never received a satisfactory answer for why a lot of people from these fields are all about "Everyone should learn to code" initiatives, but not, say "Everyone should learn to be a citizen journalist", or "Everyone should learn to be a copy editor". Indeed, in many aspects, the latter would seem to share many aspects with learning to code (attention to detail, focus on syntax, etc.), and be more accessible. My conclusion is that there is no desire to increase participation in or accessibility to the field of journalism, because of a rejection of the Jevons paradox. And consequently, the shrinking field seems to rely heavily on credentialism and connections to choose who becomes a journalist.

whimsicalism 5y ago
This hits the nail on the head. All of my friends who are in the process of becoming journalists have to spend tons of time working unpaid shitty internships just to get a low paying bottom rung job. The only people I know who are even able to get jobs like this either have parents in the industry or have rich parents, often both. This is also true for the humanities in academia writ large - most of the people I know getting a PhD in the humanities have rich parents.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  The cause is pretty obvious: journalists and other humanities do not pay well. People are not willing to pay for the garbage modern journalists put out, so there is not much money in the field. The only people going into the field, therefore, are those who are independently rich (rich parents) and ideologically motivated (which further reduces the quality of modern journalism).
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Sounds like a problem with politicians as well, particularly beyond the local level.

adwn 5y ago

Where's my PC Bullshit Bingo (TM) card? I need to cross off a couple of fields: 1) reducing "diversity" to "different skin colors" 2) fixating on the Third-Reich-esque concept of "human race" 3) insisting that skin colors can be neatly sorted into 4-5 discrete categories 4) lamenting the ratio between these categories, without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why

throwaway2077 5y ago
>without stating what the correct ratio should be, and why oh, they don't really hesitate to state that the lower the ratio of a certain group of people is the better. not just in the "melting pot" of the US, but everywhere in the world, including the countries where that group of people is the indigenous population.
mjburgess 5y ago
It's better to read this as just a form of "genuine politics" in the sense that it's one group saying they want more resources than they have. Here, the message is basically: our people want more of what your people have. ("Proper ratios" arent the point). This is what most of these movements are about, a certain type of economic-political warefare most accute when high-status positions are rare and there's a lot of competition for them. I think this perspective also, in some sense, "humanises, justifies and rationalises" this type of agit-prop. Ie., I actually have a lot of sympathy for "genuine politics" -- ie., competition over finite resources and their allocation. It's just some people saying, "we think we're owed more than we have" -- and that's a real political claim everyone, at somepoint, makes justifiably. Here, I say: let them make their demands. It's part of politics. It is likely this author (or their group) wants a resource: a job in journalism. There arent many. If they have some grounds to demand it, let them demand it. (It is however dressed up and disguised in this weird theology of race, gender, etc.).
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  HN is such an idiosyncratic place. You could frame any number of struggles this way and feel smug about being "above it all." "our people want more of what your people have." -> What "your people have" could be freedom from slavery in 1864, ability to attend the same schools, etc. etc. Framing it in this way does not make the argument less compelling and I have no idea why you think that race-based discrimination is a "theology" in a country that had explicit legal discrimination against black people up until the 70s and plenty of informal discrimination afterwards.

Fordec 5y ago

I would contend that, while a subset, GAMMA companies != all tech companies as the headline implies

xondono 5y ago
Off topic, but I feel obligated to comment each time I see the “GAMMA” acronym. We either change according to parent company, and then we need to take the G and put an A. Or we don’t and leave the F. GAMMA makes no sense.
- akavi 5y ago
  FAANG started as a stock ticker acronym. Facebook's stock ticker's now $mtvs, Google's is still $goog/$googl. That's a justification at least.

ilamont 5y ago

So here is a more comprehensive data bank of 982 individuals across 14 publications. This is not comprehensive. It's a subset consisting of newer online technology publications, skewing toward consumer niches. Enterprise-focused publications are not included. Editors are not included unless they are on the masthead and/or have bylined articles. That excludes specialist roles such as copy editors and feature editors. The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph? That said, even if TFA is restricted to U.S.-based publications and enterprise tech is included along with all of the other behind-the-scenes tech journalists who are seldom acknowledged or credited, the race disparity that the authors identified would still be there. Why? It's because the talent pipeline has been broken for two decades. Before 2000, tech journalists used to come up through daily newspapers and then were hired by one of the consumer or trade tech magazines or sometimes a business newspaper or magazine. U.S. daily newspapers in the 20th century were pretty white places to work, and that was reflected in the makeup of the tech newsrooms (I worked in 3). After 2000, the pipeline suffered. Newspapers folded, and there were few entry level positions for college and grad school journalism majors (who were increasingly diverse) to apply to. Concurrently, traditional tech newsrooms started consolidating following the first dot com bubble, the 2008 recession, and the shift to online. Art departments and copy desks were let go en masse. Reporters and editors were let go as well, usually starting with the younger journalists but later expanding to very experienced senior writers and editors. At these publications, there was almost no new hiring for FT reporter or editor roles. Empty positions were not backfilled. Among the younger journalists who left or were laid off, most did not go to Mashable or TechCrunch, which paid little and often would only hire stringers with no benefits ... instead, they went to industry, where Microsoft or Intel or PWC or whoever would give them 2x the salary and real benefits to work in their expanding marketing and digital content departments.

quadrifoliate 5y ago
> The other problem is tech journalism doesn't start and end at the U.S. border. On HN, I frequently see articles from Europe or Asia, such as news from Nikkei or Digitimes or Wired UK. Shouldn't that data be included on the graph? Diversity in tech is usually discussed from a U.S. perspective. I don't think anyone is looking at diversity figures in Asian tech companies. So restricting the comparison to U.S. tech journalism seems fair.

Traster 5y ago

Some of this looks quite.... questionable, and ironically for people that spend so much of their time attacking "the media", this authors would do well to learn something about journalism, and some of it seems downright disingenous. For example, the author talks about representation and talks about that in terms of percentage of white people hired in big tech, but if you dig in to those numbers you find out that basically the reason the big tech companies have a low number of white employees is because they have an enormous over-representation of asian employees. It's all well and good to say "Only 51.7% of employees at Google are white, so clearly we've got great diversity" - but using the same statistics you can also say "93% of the workforce is white or asian and that rises to 95.5% in leadership positions". Sudenly that doens't look so stunning. In fact it almost looks deliberately misleading. Then you look at their methodology for looking at who is in Tech journalism. There are just some glaring issues. First of all - are we really grabbing a single month of authors in the NYT? And if you're grabbing the data from the NYT website, why not just do that over a few years? Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don't like the NYT? And meanwhile, they therefore completely skate over a massive obvious problem - a massive amount of Tech journalism is independent or covered in publications that aren't listed here - does AnandTech not count as tech journalism now? Let's completely ignore independent journalists shall we? The second list of tech journalists is literally just "We found this random list of tech journalists and took it at face value". Now there are about 1000 different problems I have with this study (I think it's frankly just quite shoddy) but a real highlight was where they just admit to basically finding the list of jouranlists (a list I quite frankly think is just worthless due to the methodology) and then just start guessing whether they're white. The author complains that no tech journalists will cover this, but this is just really really shoddy work, and that doesn't even get into the obvious fact that Big Tech and Big Tech journalism are not the same! We're literally comparing a list of less than 1000 journalists to companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people.

noslenwerdna 5y ago
The author calls for tech journals to release their race data. This is why the author has to resort to the approximations you take issue with. "Big Tech Media corporations should do the right thing and release the demographic breakdown of their employee base. There is even a federal requirement to file the form EEO-1 Survey which breaks this data down."

deleted 5y ago

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spamizbad 5y ago

I know two Black technical journalists; they are both blocked by various industry people. Their articles are sourced almost exclusively from investigative reporting/leaks from lower-level employees. Meanwhile super antagonistic while journos will weirdly be omitted from block lists.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Did they publish their articles, though, somewhere at all? I'd love to read a good quality investigative article any day. I couldn't care less about how much melanin the author got, but I like good stories with the "from below" perspective. They are invariably better than the founders/leaders information bubbles a lot of outlets like to fixate upon.

rayiner 5y ago

The HuffPo editorial board is less diverse than the GOP: https://www.mic.com/articles/144177/this-tweet-from-a-huffington-post-editor-shows-the-problem-with-white-feminism https://www.mic.com/articles/144177/this-tweet-from-a-huffin...

AlanYx 5y ago

You see this phenomenon in policy development too. My current favorite example is the AI ethics/policy space. A lot is being written by policy people about the "whiteness" of AI and those developing it. But most real world technical and research teams are actually remarkably diverse along many lines (I'm not saying there isn't still work to be done though). Then you take a look at the AI policy/ethics space... for example, here's the team behind the Council of Europe's Ad-Hoc Committee on AI (CAHAI): https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai https://www.coe.int/en/web/artificial-intelligence/cahai A couple hundred people, all but one who are from the same general demographic and rough age range. Yet it's these people who feel that their energy is best spent criticizing tech teams.

joeman1000 5y ago

This graph is bad. It looks like a cumulative frequency graph. It looks more like a sediment analysis.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

truthwhisperer 5y ago

because the quality is not measured on whether you're a male or female but on the number of readers or clicks. Very transparent and very non-discriminatory. We all know woman write differently and generally speaking don't touch the bits and bytes but more the feelings/humanity behind. For example, questions like does a chip have feelings or what about this twin brother does he feel lonely

mayli 5y ago

How about NBA is less diverse than tech?

johncessna 5y ago

This is a great example of fitting data to your conclusion. You're comparing the entire population of employees of major tech companies against specific journalists. Why not compare the entire companies? Also the idea that diversity at a big tech companies is an indication of diversity in technical fields is just wrong.

civilized 5y ago

Oh, the people who criticize everyone else are hypocrites? Really?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

Why did they choose "white" as a measurement of diversity? I think if they had chosen "Asian", the graph would show an opposite picture: lower diversity at tech than in writers.