I can't really apologize for my brethren in the market, but yes, tech journalism tends to be terrible. The journalism market was already disrupted by Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Blogs in particular are great, because instead of reading what some idiot from journalism school has to say about, oh, I dunno.... uhm.... exceptions versus errors in programming languages (as touched off by that Python vs. Go post), instead of reading some wonk's interpretation, you can instead read a developer's opinion.

In the meantime I just wanted to point out that everyone and their mother is making "announcements" about Spanner, and usually trying to make the world think they're better. Mostly this is from NoSQL companies.