4 ms·

"Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article; that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hou

"Let’s say it takes an extremely unscientific average of 15 minutes to research, write, edit, and publish this kind of article; that’s 15,000 minutes or 250 hours of human capital that I mobilized by sitting here and moving my hands a bit on a Sunday evening." This quote sums up why the tech news business can be such a miserable grind for writers (people burn out all the time), and why online news will never make the kind of money that print did. The fact that the tech news scene can afford to throw ~250 man-hours (though it was way more if you count the time spent prepping & promoting the posts, not just writing) at a trivial hoax like this is indicative of three things: 1. The barrier to entry for all of this is pretty low. If you can type and you have some hustle, then you, too, can help fill the internet with ~300-word stories about the latest (fake) phone. And because the barrier to entry is so low... 2. ...Talent is relatively cheap, so sites can afford to pay writers and editors to chase nonsense like this. And because talent is so cheap.... 3. ...Talent is desperate, because the only way you advance in the business is to get your name at the top of the pageviews leaderboard again and again. So you'll literally cover anything if it will get hits. All of the above leads to a massive glut of words and, ultimately, ad inventory in the tech news space. You don't have to have a Nobel Prize in econ to see what this miserable dynamic means for publishers' bottom lines. Seriously, the real news in this hoax isn't the power of the Internet to "mobilize human capital" -- it's the power of the Internet to boost the supply of said capital to the point where it's just not worth anything close to what it used to be.

corin_ 14y ago
> "All of the above leads to a massive glut of words and, ultimately, ad inventory in the tech news space. You don't have to have a Nobel Prize in econ to see what this miserable dynamic means for publishers' bottom lines." There's room for good websites with well-paid staff who are experts and they can make profit too. Rather than talk about an example from my company, a higher profile one: TechRadar. Their target audience is a little less tech-savvy than me, or most HN readers, but trust me when I say that their staff know what they're talking about - I obviously don't know them all, but I know a few from management down, and they're the bees knees. And they make money. There's plenty of other examples including sites that don't simplify for the audience quite so much. What the current situation with online tech coverage has done isn't to make it impossible to succeed financially, it's just made it far easier to try and do it badly, and with so many more people trying, the percentage of those who succeed naturally drops. It's like if tomorrow anyone could buy an F1 race car - the average ability of drivers would drop way down, but it doesn't mean it's any harder to be a professional racer.
- anonymfus 14y ago
  BTW, TechRadar also writed about it: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-nexus-for-sony-leaked-in-new-images-1104569 http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil... . Currently there are no update about hoax from them. Problem is not only in quality of writing. Problem is that most of sites don't have other sources of news than other sites and can not afford to don't write about stories reported by competitors. There are same news on all of them from Engadget to Techradar. And when some story is reported with significant delay readers usually complain about it in comments.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    Sorry, I was talking only in the context of the comment I was replying to, about the overall situation for tech writers and publishers. I didn't mean to imply that TechRadar, or any other site, can guarantee 100% accuracy when it comes to rumours - no form of press in any industry has ever been able to do that.

corin_ 14y ago

> "All of the above leads to a massive glut of words and, ultimately, ad inventory in the tech news space. You don't have to have a Nobel Prize in econ to see what this miserable dynamic means for publishers' bottom lines." There's room for good websites with well-paid staff who are experts and they can make profit too. Rather than talk about an example from my company, a higher profile one: TechRadar. Their target audience is a little less tech-savvy than me, or most HN readers, but trust me when I say that their staff know what they're talking about - I obviously don't know them all, but I know a few from management down, and they're the bees knees. And they make money. There's plenty of other examples including sites that don't simplify for the audience quite so much. What the current situation with online tech coverage has done isn't to make it impossible to succeed financially, it's just made it far easier to try and do it badly, and with so many more people trying, the percentage of those who succeed naturally drops. It's like if tomorrow anyone could buy an F1 race car - the average ability of drivers would drop way down, but it doesn't mean it's any harder to be a professional racer.

anonymfus 14y ago
BTW, TechRadar also writed about it: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-nexus-for-sony-leaked-in-new-images-1104569 http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil... . Currently there are no update about hoax from them. Problem is not only in quality of writing. Problem is that most of sites don't have other sources of news than other sites and can not afford to don't write about stories reported by competitors. There are same news on all of them from Engadget to Techradar. And when some story is reported with significant delay readers usually complain about it in comments.
- corin_ 14y ago
  Sorry, I was talking only in the context of the comment I was replying to, about the overall situation for tech writers and publishers. I didn't mean to imply that TechRadar, or any other site, can guarantee 100% accuracy when it comes to rumours - no form of press in any industry has ever been able to do that.