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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

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."
- Traster 5y ago
  My issue isn't that he comes up with an approximation. My issue is he comes up with a bad approximation. Are you really telling me all 13 news organisations declined to comment to him? Or did he not even ask. And at least justify your arbitrary 13 organisations. It's just really damn lazy. I mean, at the very least they could have just pinged each of the people they found a DM saying "Hey I'm doing a survey would you be willing to share your self-identified race" - a level of fact checking that the actual media would go through before publication.
throwaway192874 5y ago
> 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? These are some of the biggest media publications that write about tech issues, these aren't just "random" choices. This author seems to focus on "big tech media" as is mentioned in the article multiple times, these are big tech media, independent journalists are not. Anecdotal, but I know every one of them off the top of my head, I've personally never heard of AnandTech and had to google it.
- Traster 5y ago
  The big tech media term is just bullshit. "Big Tech" describes a handful of companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people. "Big Tech media" is either media about big tech - in which case this list is a horrible mis-representation missing some of the most obvious names in big tech journalism (Gruber, Gurman, MKBHD for Apple journalism for example, the Wallstreet Journal breaking the Facebook whistleblower and Theranos). Or it can be read as big "Tech Media" in which case it's also misleading- since the 13 companies in "Big Tech Media" account for less than 1,000 employees compared to the the "Big Tech" companies that account for hundreds of thousands of employees each. You're literally comparing an ant hill to mount everest.
  - throwaway192874 5y ago
    Well now you're shifting the goal posts to a different topic. I was responding to your claim of this set of companies being random and your concern about some not being included The size of these companies is irrelevant to that point And who are these companies you keep mentioning? They don't even come up when I search them on DuckDuckGo. That's how small they are in comparison to the companies the author included as "big tech"
    - Traster 5y ago
      I'm not moving the goal posts -the goal posts as I'll state them is "Big Tech Media" is a nebulous term that you can't reasonably define as these 13 companies. I don't know why you're struggling to find the people I've listed, MKBHD is arguably the single largest tech youtuber, John Gruber at daring fireball regularly appears on HN, Mark Gurman - at Bloomberg is basically the leading reporter to cover Apple, and I don't think we need to explain how big Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal are. But they're conspicuous by their absense. As for the ones that are on the list - they're largely just brand names as part larger conglomerates like Conde Naste or Future Plc, or Yahoo! What I'm saying is we can have standards like "I took the 10 brands that have the top ranking on Alexa in this category plus 5 tech arms of larger titles" - or something like that, an actual objective standard for what they're selecting rather than a grab bag of 13 random companies.

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."

Traster 5y ago
My issue isn't that he comes up with an approximation. My issue is he comes up with a bad approximation. Are you really telling me all 13 news organisations declined to comment to him? Or did he not even ask. And at least justify your arbitrary 13 organisations. It's just really damn lazy. I mean, at the very least they could have just pinged each of the people they found a DM saying "Hey I'm doing a survey would you be willing to share your self-identified race" - a level of fact checking that the actual media would go through before publication.

throwaway192874 5y ago

> 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? These are some of the biggest media publications that write about tech issues, these aren't just "random" choices. This author seems to focus on "big tech media" as is mentioned in the article multiple times, these are big tech media, independent journalists are not. Anecdotal, but I know every one of them off the top of my head, I've personally never heard of AnandTech and had to google it.

Traster 5y ago
The big tech media term is just bullshit. "Big Tech" describes a handful of companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people. "Big Tech media" is either media about big tech - in which case this list is a horrible mis-representation missing some of the most obvious names in big tech journalism (Gruber, Gurman, MKBHD for Apple journalism for example, the Wallstreet Journal breaking the Facebook whistleblower and Theranos). Or it can be read as big "Tech Media" in which case it's also misleading- since the 13 companies in "Big Tech Media" account for less than 1,000 employees compared to the the "Big Tech" companies that account for hundreds of thousands of employees each. You're literally comparing an ant hill to mount everest.
- throwaway192874 5y ago
  Well now you're shifting the goal posts to a different topic. I was responding to your claim of this set of companies being random and your concern about some not being included The size of these companies is irrelevant to that point And who are these companies you keep mentioning? They don't even come up when I search them on DuckDuckGo. That's how small they are in comparison to the companies the author included as "big tech"
  - Traster 5y ago
    I'm not moving the goal posts -the goal posts as I'll state them is "Big Tech Media" is a nebulous term that you can't reasonably define as these 13 companies. I don't know why you're struggling to find the people I've listed, MKBHD is arguably the single largest tech youtuber, John Gruber at daring fireball regularly appears on HN, Mark Gurman - at Bloomberg is basically the leading reporter to cover Apple, and I don't think we need to explain how big Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal are. But they're conspicuous by their absense. As for the ones that are on the list - they're largely just brand names as part larger conglomerates like Conde Naste or Future Plc, or Yahoo! What I'm saying is we can have standards like "I took the 10 brands that have the top ranking on Alexa in this category plus 5 tech arms of larger titles" - or something like that, an actual objective standard for what they're selecting rather than a grab bag of 13 random companies.