

Tech Journalism is Broken - toomuchblah
http://stupidiswinning.tumblr.com/post/33563734252/journalism

======
cstross
This 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.))

~~~
klint
I'm a tech journalist -- I write for both TechCrunch and Wired Enterprise. I
didn't write either of those pieces mentioned, but like many other tech
journalists you'll find plenty of re-writes in my portfolio.

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.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
So, what you're saying is that TC has the same people working on rewrites
_and_ features? Doesn't it make more sense to give the busy work to interns
and let the higher paid journalists do original content?

~~~
klint
That's no differentiation -- there's just writers. I can't speak to why that's
the case -- maybe because they don't want to make anyone be the person who
does nothing but crap work. I don't think anyone sets out planning to do a
bunch of rewrites anyway. In my experience it just sneaks up on you "Oh, well
we should probably cover this and I need a post, guess I'll just do this real
quick." That's just my experience, but there's certainly no one at TC telling
me to do rewrites. I guess there's also varying definitions of what
constitutes a re-write -- I don't actually always depend on a press release or
anyone's else's coverage for every news short news story.

------
jbrodkin
I'm a tech journalist (for Ars Technica) so I figured I'd weigh in. First of
all, I totally agree that there is tons and tons of awful tech journalism, and
I regularly make fun of it. But I don't think all of these examples are quite
so terrible.

The Wired story has some interesting comments from a very important person in
the tech world. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it seems fine to me.

I'm not a TechCrunch fan, but this particular story relays some interesting
information that people might not have read if they read TechCrunch instead of
TorrentFreak. I've quoted TorrentFreak in some of my own stories, it's often a
good source. There are so many worse examples from TechCrunch that could be
used to make the case against tech journalism, but I'll just point out one:
[http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-
coulda...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-coulda-been/)

Agreed on the BI and Mashable examples. Funnily enough, the Mashable one could
have been good if it showed the actual evolution of Windows user interfaces
rather than stupid illustrations of people sitting at desks.

If anyone wants a great parody of awful tech journalism, I suggest following
this person on Twitter (I especially love the picture, which is a parody of
the guy who started Mashable): <https://twitter.com/nexttechblog>

------
acangiano
Ninety 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/wiki/Sturgeons_Law>

~~~
001sky
_Good tech journalism exists_

Are unpaid comments and blog posts, however, not asymptotically
approaching/surpassing their quality?

What about signal/noise ratio?

~~~
riffraff
S/N on comments goes down as soon as the thing becomes popular, am insightful
comment is as likely to appear on slashdot, on a wordpress install or on TC,
if it's n a popular topic.

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.

------
pixelmonkey
The 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.

------
madrona
What sucks is that a lot of good places like The Atlantic and Wired are also
applying their brands on link-laden blogs with no editorial standards
whatsoever. It's short term gains at long term losses to their credibility.

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.

------
mddw
When 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.

------
cagenut
Y'know how "work expands to fill a vacuum"? Well in media noise expands to
fill bandwidth.

------
FuzzyDunlop
This 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...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-
Distortion/dp/0701181451)

------
mmvvaa
Not all tech journalism is created equal - or for the same audience, for that
matter. @sarahcuda at <http://pandodaily.com> is leading a hard battle to
remain an unquestionable source of original content, investigative reporting
and industry insights unseen elsewhere. Pando should not be placed in the same
platter as TC, BI, Mashable or the likes. In my opinion, Pando is to tech,
what The Economist is to business, or The New Yorker is to culture.

~~~
jbrodkin
Either you work for PandoDaily or this is a very elaborate tongue-in-cheek
comment. I'm certain you're the first and last person to ever say "Pando is to
tech, what The Economist is to business, or The New Yorker is to culture."

It's just a spinoff of TechCrunch in both its origins and content. It's like
the Joanie Loves Chachi to Happy Days.

I'll just assume you're joking.

~~~
mmvvaa
Sorry to disappoint, I wasn't joking. Nor am I in any way associated to Pando,
Sarah, or anything related to them.

------
xpose2000
Amen. 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.

------
jonnyrowntree
I have to admit that tech journalism is good in some aspects - especially if
the journalist conveys a good point.

