
What the "Black screen of death" story says about tech journalism  - malte
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1575
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alanstorm
Tech journalism has always seemed more like sports journalism than hard news.
The people doing the reporting tend to be enthusiasts for the companies
(teams) they're reporting on, repeat press releases almost verbatim (play-by-
play, injury reports), and often end up being less than objective when it
comes to certain companies (home town sportscasters).

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jordanb
Yeah, and they mostly have no serious understanding of the technology. At
least the typical sportscaster maybe played the sport in High School. He has
some distant connection to the sport beyond being that of a spectator with a
camera in front of him. I'd be surprised if any major tech journalist was ever
a serious programmer.

They seem to be entirely obsessed with cell phones for some reason.

I think the issue is that the "tech press" is just an overgrown version of the
"trade press" that exists for every industry. Somewhere out there, there are
reporters writing articles abut squeegees for the janitorial industry. [1]

The "Trade Press" mostly exists to provide a vehicle for industrial vendors to
advertise to their niche. They fill in the space between the ads by hiring
b-grade writers who couldn't hack it at the New York Post, and get them
rewrite press releases from the advertisers.

The "tech press" is exactly the same thing, only more hyperactive, trollish,
and ostentatious --- to better complement the industry they cover.

[1] In fact, here you go: <http://www.cleanlink.com/>

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breckognize
Isn't all for-profit news suspect? Free market advocates would argue that,
over time, people will realize that certain news agencies aren't accurate and
would then pay (either with their wallets or their eyeballs) for the more
reliable news sources. The unreliable sources would go out of business,
leaving us with only reliable, fact-checked news.

Of course, the problem with this is that people's metric for "good" news isn't
what's accurate - it's what's most entertaining. Or, in the case of Fox,
whatever reinforces their existing world view. Market forces don't create
reliable news - they create sensational reporting.

This is unfortunate because a reliable free press is critical for democracies
to function. Perhaps for-profit news is as fundamentally flawed as for-profit
healthcare.

~~~
Robin_Message
It's not fair to say only Fox is watched to reinforce people's existing world
view. I'd say most news sources, on all sides of the political spectrum and
beyond, do that.

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chris100
Excellent article worth reading. It will make you rethink how superior
bloggers are to mainstream media, and whether mainstream media deserves to die
or not.

Personally, I still believe that investigative journalism has a lot of value,
but no way to charge top dollars for that value.

~~~
quantumhobbit
Mainstream media has killed itself by adopting many of the lazy tactics that
bloggers are being accused of. Does anyone here really trust the news that
they hear on cbs or the nytimes after scandals in recent years. Mainstream
media's only hope of survival is to establish a brand of trustworthiness not
join bloggers in a race to the bottom. They can't win that race while
maintaining any shred of journalistic integrity. I think that the future of
journalism will be dominated by two forces: the teaming mass of bloggers and
cable news racing to be the first with a story regardless of the quality of
the story, and premium trusted journal type news that is late but well
researched and trustworthy.

Other than the Economist, I'm not aware of any news sources that have aimed
for that type of trustworthiness as a selling point. I'd like to hear about
any news sources everyone here trusts, not blindly trusts like my father-in-
law trusts Fox News but empirically trustworthy fact-driven news.

~~~
oostevo
The Economist has an established editorial slant and actively practices
advocacy journalism.

You're looking for The Christian Science Monitor. Their whole reason for being
is avoiding sensationalist reporting (biased reporting, I'd argue, is
impossible to avoid completely). They go so far as to not use any of the wire
services, so that biases don't creep in there, and use their own on-the-ground
reporters instead.

What's tragic is that news sources like that are being plowed under along with
the Fox Newses of the world with everyone's decision that "eh, blogs are just
as good."

(edit: Well that's embarrassing. Apparently HTML markup doesn't work here.)

~~~
onewland
While I agree that The Economist has an editorial slant, it is at least
informative enough that you can form your own independent opinion from their
reporting. (At the beginning of the 2008 presidential campaign they seemed to
be stumping hard for McCain; they were my main source of news and I still
wasn't swayed away from Obama.)

As far as sensationalism and lack of depth, I'm not sure they can really be
faulted.

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omouse
Both PC World and ComputerWorld (especially ComputerWorld) are the tabloids of
the industry. They just have a _lot_ of money to spend on shoddy journalism.

