Tech Journalism is Broken

And no blogger can reasonably write often enough on an array of subjects wide enough to keep the level of a news site, unless she takes in some other authors, and at that point there is not a lot of difference.

Also, there are still many sites that are widely above 90% of the blogs, such as ARS o the reg.

There are many interesting tech blogs (acangiano's is one :) ) but they don't fill everything that tech journalism should be.

Amongst the cabal of editors, PR and companies the racket was positive coverage in return for access.

At least today we have viable independent sources who can build an audience without giving a crap about access or offending PR people.

I would like to start a curated list of high quality journalism sites with a policy of delisting the sites that go The AOL Way, given sufficient evidence provided by users. It would be awesome if we could remove the profit motive from stooping to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

I'm speaking for myself and not from either company. But I can tell you though everyone in the industry is aware of the problem and trying to get away from re-writing to produce more original content.

The problem, as I see it, is that volume drives most online publishing. Making money depends on having updates throughout the day. That means every writer needs to post something every day -- usually more than one thing a day.

Even though most of these quick hit stories don't get many pageviews individually, they add up, and occassionally even a quicky will become a "blockbuster" that gets a huge number of pageviews. Original stories get a more consistently high number of hits, but they take much longer to produce.

I'm not sure people appreciate how much time it actually takes to write this stuff. Even doing quick hit journalism takes time. For example, I spent a couple hours this week on a post about Solr 4.0. It's short, and it's based entirely on the announcement/feature list but it still took a couple hours to write.

I have a bunch of original stuff I'm working on, but quick hit posts cut into the time I spend on those stories. At least part of that is a time management issue on my part -- and I'm a slower writer than many of my colleagues -- but I expect that juggling the needs to publish daily with longer form work is an issue for many tech bloggers.

(You should also not underestimate the amount of time we spend filtering information and looking for new -- e-mail, briefings, competitors sites, Twitter, etc.)

Anyway, I think things are slowly changing for the better thanks to reader demand for better content. But there's also a need to balance completeness of coverage with original work.

It's funny that Wired was singled out because I think they/we actually have a really good original content to re-write ratio (though yeah, Wired's always been known for sensationalist headlines). TechCrunch and Business Insider both have lots of original content as well. Because BI does so much volume I think people overlook the original stuff.

Another note about rosy retrospection: I don't want to defend the rewrite churn, but I do want to point out that even most daily newspapers have a significant amount of non-original content. Instead of re-writes though they tend to rely on newswires and syndicated columns and comics.

Re-writes aren't just done to get a quick post, they're also done to point readers to stuff they might not otherwise read -- as jbrodkin points out, not all TC readers read TorrentFreak. There are otherwise of getting this sort of stuff out -- like maybe just doing a linkblog that points directly to a story run elsewhere. In some cases it's possible to just call the original source and get the story so you don't have to link to/re-write a competitor's work -- I do this when I can but it slows things down (example: my story on Elbrus Technologies for Wired ran two days later than all our competitors because I waited for people from the company to get back to me instead of just basing my story on the EETimes report).

So yeah, it's getting better, everyone's worried about it but it's not simple to fix.