Tech Journalism is Broken
stupidiswinning.tumblr.com
Tech Journalism is Broken
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#2This piece understates the problem, if anything. A lot of "journalism" today consists of regurgitating press releases rather than actually reporting on issues. And a lot of tech journalists have journalism qualifications but no tech -- gone are the pioneering days when the magazines found it easier to pick up techies and give them the basic training in journalism to communicate what they understood.
Consequently we find product reviews that are checklists of features, composed by writers who lack all insight or understanding of the subject. And outlets all-but-plagiarizing each others' regurgitated press releases.
(The disease isn't universal, of course. Some sources -- for example, anandtech.com -- get pretty close to the old-school hardcore reporting from time to time. Others actually cover industry movements from an informed perspective. But the drive to get eyeballs on ads is inimical to insight; it encourages facile, superficial, and above all speedy publication with a smattering of titillating headlines to draw the readers in. And it does us all a huge disservice.)
((Disclaimer: I spent years doing this for a living. I also have a CS degree, circa 1990 vintage. I may be viewing the old days through rose-tinted spectacles ... but I don't think so.))
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#3Ninety percent of everything is crap. [1] That's a bad starting point. Add to this the fact that free publications on the web have a strong incentive to maximize their income via ads, and what you get is a crap-fest of sensationalism. Good tech journalism exists, but it's somewhat rare and sorting through the crap to find it is rather fatiguing. It's also unlikely to show up on TechCrunch.
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#4This isn't necessarily unique to tech journalism, and I highly recommend giving Flat Earth News[0] a read for a greater insight into the commoditisation of news (amongst other things), and churnalism.
I guess it's more noticeable to us within tech, because HN generally aggregates a fair amount of content from TechCrunch, and Mashable, and so on, and it's not unusual to see four or five links to these things every day.
A solution is to post and upvote the original source where possible, and hope it attracts more discussion than the churn does.
[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distor...
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#5Amen. Not to mention most Tech sites make no attempts to do investigative reporting.
What annoys me most are the "news" posts about startups that throw around all these insane numbers that aren't even remotely realistic. Six months later people are surprised that the company is "pivoting" or is nearly bankrupt.
More often than not they simply wait for the next press release by X company and present it as if its hard hitting news then move on to the next post.
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#6Y'know how "work expands to fill a vacuum"? Well in media noise expands to fill bandwidth.
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#7The Verge, The Next Web, ArsTechnica, and other sites produce lots of high-quality tech journalism regularly.
It's true there's a lot of crap out there, but this has always been true in the journalism world. And it's true that many sites have dubious practices that are 100% for reasons that don't matter to readers, like advertising and SEO. But is that the journalist's fault -- or the system's?
I speak to editors and writers regularly as part of my work at Parse.ly, and many of them are extremely worried about being "dinged by Google". They also hire experts who read the tea leaves on declarations from Matt Cutts and the Google search team, hoping to come up with a strategy that will make Google treat their site as one of several "blessed" domains.
Why? Showing up well in SERP pages or Google News can often be the difference between an article that fizzles and one that garners thousands of eyeballs.
The problem with SEO isn't that some editors/writers do it. The problem is that it works. And, it often has nothing to do with the quality of your content.
It's like complaining that public stock markets are "broken" because some companies goose accounting numbers to look better to investors (e.g. Groupon). Yes, some do, but not all companies. No system is perfect.
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#8Ninety percent of everything is crap. [1] That's a bad starting point. Add to this the fact that free publications on the web have a strong incentive to maximize their income via ads, and what you get is a crap-fest of sensationalism. Good tech journalism exists, but it's somewhat rare and sorting through the crap to find it is rather fatiguing. It's also unlikely to show up on TechCrunch. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/…
Good tech journalism exists
Are unpaid comments and blog posts, however, not asymptotically approaching/surpassing their quality?
What about signal/noise ratio?
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#9This piece understates the problem, if anything. A lot of "journalism" today consists of regurgitating press releases rather than actually reporting on issues . And a lot of tech journalists have journalism qualifications but no tech -- gone are the pioneering days when the magazines found it easier to pick up techies and give them the basic training in journalism to communicate what they understood. Consequently we…
It doesn't really say the problem at all -- it just uses examples and lets the reader think between the lines.
They're great examples through. Exactly the kinds of reasons I got out of tech journalism.
Re: Tech Journalism is Broken
#10When press is free, it's not free press anymore.
If a website is not behind some kind of paywall, he lives on ads and must enter the crazy linkbaiting/SEO dance.