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I went to journalism school and spent a little time afterwards writing for money before taking an entrepreneurial tack. A year or so into that, I realized it w
by brandnewlow 15y ago
I went to journalism school and spent a little time afterwards writing for money before taking an entrepreneurial tack.
A year or so into that, I realized it was really hard to take seriously any business reporting that wasn't coming from someone who had actually run a business or startup reporting from someone who had actually started a company. My journalist friends would cry foul, but unless you've been the person faced with the daunting task of "finding a market" for a new product or "scaling a sales channel" after one's been discovered, I'm not going to pay too much heed to your criticisms of others efforts to do so.
I think that's what Mr. Siegler is getting at when he says he now realizes all the tech writing out there is full of crap. Some of the bloggers out there own their operations and have built real businesses out of it and so have a lot of authority when it comes to writing about other companies. This does not describe many of the contributors I see on major blogs though, so I take their posts with a grain of salt.
- puppybeard 15y agoI agree with you, and MG Siegler, by extension, that most tech writing is crap. The best writing I've seen is always by technical professionals, rather than journalists assigned to write about technology. However I count Siegler as in the latter camp. He's a fanboy and he's never built anything. With his article above he's saying "this criticism of a company I'm involved with isn't valid, because these people aren't technically expert". That's wrong because you don't need to be a technical expert to value and appreciate personal privacy, which is the key issue. It's also hypocritical, because he's not a technical expert himself. Like the people he complains about, he makes his money from hype generated around products, without being capable of making his own product.