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5G Got me Fired

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Re: 5G Got me Fired

#31

Post by ghaff »

busterarm wrote: post #24

I did post about this in the other thread and folks piled on calling me a conspiracy theorist, but in the letter JCD received from his editor, they said they were shutting down all outside columns. This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.

In my personal experience though, ending these sorts of outside contracts with a half-truth in the vein of "the organization has decided to make a change" isn't remotely unusual. It's entirely possible that PC Mag decided to prune their outside contributors to a core group and perhaps change their relationship somewhat with the remaining ones.

Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you in some form for a very long time? Sure. But I've seen a number of online pubs that go through changes with their outside contributors and communication is mostly pretty poor.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#32

Post by WalterGR »

dev_dull wrote: post #16
Barrin92 wrote: post #7

>This is a cautionary tale. Anyone writing for any publisher in today’s commercial market, where the managed advertorial and native ad seems to be the only way to make money, needs to be cautious. More importantly today’s readers need to be a little more than cautious when believing anything. Native advertising is a most insidious concept and should be rejected by every publisher. Instead it is welcomed by the broadc…

I don’t think there’s any change needed. Why prop up the status quo with bureaucracy? Mainstream media was shedding eyes and under scrutiny well before “fake news”. Let MSM die its slow death while new and better services make their debut.

Please define mainstream media. Are you using it in the right-wing sense of “media that isn’t our personal hagiographers”?

> Mainstream media was shedding eyes

News has been “shedding” paid subscribers. Shedding eyes? Citation needed.

> and under scrutiny

By who?

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#33

Post by busterarm »

ghaff wrote: post #31
busterarm wrote: post #24

I did post about this in the other thread and folks piled on calling me a conspiracy theorist, but in the letter JCD received from his editor, they said they were shutting down all outside columns. This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.

In my personal experience though, ending these sorts of outside contracts with a half-truth in the vein of "the organization has decided to make a change" isn't remotely unusual. It's entirely possible that PC Mag decided to prune their outside contributors to a core group and perhaps change their relationship somewhat with the remaining ones. Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you i…

The still retain outside columnists. The PC Mag editor straight up lied.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#34

Post by ghaff »

chx wrote: post #22

One of my favorite computer articles of all time is also written by Mr Dvorak: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2339629,00.asp

It's mostly nonsense though. Itanium ended up being a bad bet for Intel and HP but both companies mostly just moved on with Xeon. Intel's worse bet was on x86 in mobile.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#35

Post by bunnycorn »

John C. Dvorak is a troll and the record holder of being wrong.

He is almost everything that's bad on "tech journalism" concentrated in one.

Specially regarding his brand of hate, Apple.

He mentioned that the "mouse" of the Macintosh was bad ("There is no evidence that people want to use these things."), he claimed that Apple was going to discontinue OS X and switch to Windows (according to his "sources"), he argued that Apple should cancel the iPhone even before the thing came out, etc. etc. etc. the thing only repeats after each Apple new product, and even claimed that the $1T company was dead because the iPhone 5 was going to flop (the iPhone 5 was Apple's biggest success until the date).

There is only one reason why companies hire him or fire him, he drives clicks and magazine purchases. He is the Alex Jones of tech.

Thing is that today, people can go to many other places to get their Apple hate validated, on top of that, he wrote a negative article about 5G, and the PC Magazine sponsors are waiting for that to sell more phones, so he had to go.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#36

Post by xevb3k »

ghaff wrote: post #26
xevb3k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we read the article differently. Because he didn’t seem to be saying 5G was dangerous, more that this was the public perception, and that vendors are doing little to manage the PR around this.

If that's the intent, it's poorly written. It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have bee…

That maybe the case, but bad enough to get fired over? That’s not clear to me.

The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You’re kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there’s not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#37

Post by jandrese »

Barrin92 wrote: post #7

>This is a cautionary tale. Anyone writing for any publisher in today’s commercial market, where the managed advertorial and native ad seems to be the only way to make money, needs to be cautious. More importantly today’s readers need to be a little more than cautious when believing anything. Native advertising is a most insidious concept and should be rejected by every publisher. Instead it is welcomed by the broadc…

This sort of problem became more or less inevitable once people stopped paying for content.

With a traditional newspaper your readers are footing at least part of the bill for the articles, so you are beholden to them to keep them informed. At least in theory. These days however the only payment is coming from advertisers, so they are the only ones you need to keep happy.

This is the same problem that TV and Radio news has always had, and why they were considered inferior to newspapers for factual reporting. Of course there are a few outlets that are listener/viewer funded, and they tend to be more highly regarded than their counterparts. Outlets like the BBC, NPR, and PBS.

Theoretically cable news shouldn't have this problem since part of the cost comes from people's cable bills, but other forces have conspired to poison that well.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#38

Post by yipbub »

ghaff wrote: post #26
xevb3k wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we read the article differently. Because he didn’t seem to be saying 5G was dangerous, more that this was the public perception, and that vendors are doing little to manage the PR around this.

If that's the intent, it's poorly written. It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have bee…

He did say that topic having a real lack of studies was the main problem. 5G radiation is not the same as previous cellphone radiation which does have "XYZ studies dispute these health effects".

Sometimes presenting both sides of the argument would require making up an other side of the argument or propping it up because it doesn't exist or is bad. In that case presenting both sides of the argument would be sensationalizing.

I read this as him saying that the industry is trying to make unstudied radiation ubiquitous in our lives. The industry is not used to this pushback. The PR that results is bad.

Critical reading does not mean reacting to your first impression on the article. Especially when discussing whether the work of a man who's been covering tech since 1980 was censored over it.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#39

Post by kolderman »

bunnycorn wrote: post #35

John C. Dvorak is a troll and the record holder of being wrong. He is almost everything that's bad on "tech journalism" concentrated in one. Specially regarding his brand of hate, Apple. He mentioned that the "mouse" of the Macintosh was bad ("There is no evidence that people want to use these things."), he claimed that Apple was going to discontinue OS X and switch to Windows (according to his "sources"), he argued…

> He is the Alex Jones of tech.

Ha! I hope he responds to that on No Agenda.

Re: 5G Got me Fired

#40

Post by wincseschwab » 

  Whatever the case, the independent voice 
  cannot exist in this corrupt milieu and 
  be truly independent.
Take notice, by now, the same is also true for HN comment threads. Party lines and happy thoughts only.
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