The problem to me is that most media outlets are still populated with J-school grads when they should be housed with experts.
That's why blogs are winning, because you can go straight to these people with laser focused insights that you just can't get from a j-school grad. In the past, journalists would have to go to experts for comments and structure stories around that, now with blogs you get to cut out the middle man.
A lot of the good reporting I saw over the last year has come from experts. Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight was able to generate some really great analysis on election polls.
The crew at CalculatedRisk gave reported on the mortgage industry and financial crisis better than most mainstream outlets. Actually, Tanta over there used to have to regularly correct Gretchen Morgenson, one of the senior writers at the NYT.
With war reporting, Andrew Exum at AbuMuqawama was really really great on issues dealing with the Surge/Afghanistan/Iraq. I have to bet that one of the reasons is because he served as a ranger in Afghanistan and Iraq and then got a masters in COIN and a PhD studying Hezb.
These were instances outside of Tech where I saw some really good reporting. I think Tech media will always be ahead of everyone just based on the savviness of their consumers. You can really see that with the absolute embracing of video podcast programs by the tech crowd whereas in finance we still havent seen anything close to that for taking out trash like CNBC.
Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?
Eventually, each of them has the chance to make himself into an expert in his field. The journalism grad might also remember some stuff from her studies such as not to invest in companies operating in the field she covers, verify with several sources, try to get responses before publishing and so on.
I'd say that blogs are a huge disappointment exactly because they failed to fulfill the promise of reporting by those who know most. Instead we got reporting by the those who write most, which tend to be the Scobles and Arringtons of this world rather than the Cunninghams and Torvalds (Torvaldi? ;).
I think Fake Steve is among the sharpest commentator on this space, but he's completely wrong here, suggesting TC > NYT because something they threw out against the wall managed to stay stuck.
"Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?"
Demonstrably yes. The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed. He has done the work that they have not, and done it well. By those credentials, among his other work, he has proven his suitability to cover technology.
Blogs are not yet a replacement for all of mainstream media, but that is to be expected. Blogs are young, and profitable blogs younger yet (5-10 years at best), whereas the mainstream media is still a multibillion dollar centuries old institution. The fact that blogs are any competition whatsoever to the mainstream media is a shocking condemnation of the current state of mainstream journalism.
The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed.
I think this bears repeating. "A hot new fad sweeping the nation is deceiving your children and scamming customers for well in excess of $100 million per year" doesn't sound out of the purview of the NYT, does it? Instead of doing the ground pounding to shake out a story like that, they mainly get a press release from someone, open the Rolodex and find one of the usual suspects to give a punchy opposing quote for balance, and then publish it.
I think you're both reading way too much into the fact TechCrunch did a better job on this story than NYT. It's not unusual that some reporter will find or dig deep enough into a story that others hadn't. It doesn't prove that much.
The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky story, which nearly cost a US President his job - does this mean The Drudge Report is a better news source than the NY Times?
The point of the article is that this is a specific example of a larger trend. Have you ever noticed that when the mainstream media covers some science or technology field you happen to have expertise in the coverage is always incredibly shallow and contains several glaring errors? You perhaps labor under the assumption that all of the rest of the media's coverage of subjects you have less independent knowledge of is unbiased, accurate, and thorough. What evidence do you have to support that assumption?
In truth there is very little reporting in the mainstream media these days. Most media conglomerates rest on the advantages of access and consumer inertia. The big papers would rather "report" on their content-free, uncritical exclusive interview with a major figure than actually do the grubby, uninteresting behind the scenes grunt work to break legitimate news.
Arrington has experience with successful startups and securities law. Perhaps that helps him scrutinize start ups better, especially for gauging their revenue prospects and drilling down the drivers for that.
That might have gotten him curious about how Zygna really made their money and led him to look at those rebill ads.
Arrington grew up in California, USA and Surrey, England and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a major in economics. He went on to Stanford Law School and graduated in 1995.[6] He practiced corporate and securities law at O’Melveny & Myers, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.[7] Arrington was co-founder of Achex, an internet payments company, which was sold to First Data Corp for US$32 million and is now the back end of Western Union online. His other entrepreneurial endeavors include co-founding Zip.ca and Pool.com, acting as chief operating officer for Razorgator, and founding Edgeio.
I would find it hard to rant about scams if I owned part of Pool.com. I suppose that's because my aversion to being a hypocrite outweighs my desire to sell ads on my blog.
Can you elaborate? Pool.com appears to some sort of domain name broker at the moment. While it may not be the most reputable business ever, it seems like it's a cut or two above scamming people into subscribing to some $10/month horoscope service under false pretenses.
The promise is/was not 'reporting by those who know most'. The promise is lower barriers, democratisation & meritocracy. Scobles & Arringtons compete against Cunninghams and Torvalds on equal footing.
If success is derived from or defined as 'most readers' (not obvious in the context of blogs), then it is mostly a consequence of who people want to read. But you don't need to be concerned with blogger success. You can read whoever wants to write.
That is the promise of blogs. Anything about what the content of blogs would be was always speculation. The promise is that anything can be thrown at the wall by anyone.
It seems to me that the emphasis from Fake Steve is really more like NYT < bloggers in general, because the newspapers have lost their balls. They've gotten into bed with the politicians and corporations they report on (in some cases they're owned by the corporations they should be working to keep honest), and were doing just fine with their coke and hooker parties until technology began to pull the coke mirror out from under their nose and send the hookers home.
Just because it's fashionable to tear down Arrington and TC, doesn't mean that mainstream media should get a pass in the process.
I think Fake Steve is completely right here. And what he's really talking about has little to do with Arrington and TC.
On the other hand, the problem with populating the air waves with experts is that it's hard to put on a good show and spin the story the right way if everyone on-air is authoritative.
A better example would have been the recent Air France crash off Brazil. While the real news outlets (even the BBC) are showing pretty graphics, reporting other reporters fabricated stories as 'sources' and making stupid technical goofs (the black box doesn't send messages to a GPS satelite)
Blogs like aviation safety network and askthepilot are reporting comments from people that fly the same type on the same route, designed the black box in use and serviced the exact aircraft in question.
Mainstream media simply repeats talking points and soundbites. I was reminded of the stark difference between mainstream media and "real news" when I heard an anchor on NPR actually correcting some Republican legislator's ramblings about socialized medicine. I was shocked. It was as if I had just heard a kid talk back to his parents or something. Then, of course, I realized that this is how journalists are supposed to behave. CNN and MSNBC just "leave it there" after some blowhard spouts off a slew of factual errors.
I'm all for expecting due diligence from traditional media, but saying they're dying because Michael Arrington provided more exhaustive details for his very particular and specialized audience while the Times ran a puff piece for a much more generalized audience seems a little petty on Fake Steve's part.
Seriously. This is the same newspaper that helped legitimize a war by running Judith Miller bylines above the fold.
You're missing the point of what Fake Steve is saying. Puff pieces don't work as often anymore because they rely on people not having good access to better (non-puff) reporting.
If someone cares enough about something to read a puff-piece then they probably are going to care enough to read properly informative stories.
Increasingly, in all field (from celebrity gossip to finance to politics) you can get expert reporting from people who write well and know what they are talking about - and they provide real insights, not puff.
I don't see these two roles being mutually exclusive, nor do I see your statement to be a given ("if someone cares enough...").
The experience of sitting down with a Sunday paper is very different from that of reading a specialized outlet with a specifically targeted audience. The Sunday paper is a curated aggregator. Nine in ten stories (and probably much more than that) relate to subjects I don't have very specific knowledge of, and I'd be lost if I tried to keep up with reporting that expected significant topical familiarity.
The article proved that in one case, Techcrunch reported substantially better than New York Times. But it should be mentioned, that 1) this is not always the case, and 2) Technology is only a small part of what mainstream media cover.
Also, in my opinion, Techcrunch is not a blog in the traditional sense of that word. Yes, it uses blogging software and sorts its articles chronologically, but it is actually an Internet media company with professional staff, etc. From certain point of view, TC is mainstream technology media. Overall, this article proves nothing more that in one particular case, one media performed better than other.
The New York Times is a century and a half old. Techcrunch hasn't even passed half a decade. Blogging's ten years old. Give it another ten and where do you think it'll be?
Blogs already cover politics and technology more thoroughly than papers. I'll bet webcomics are catching up to newspaper funnies in popularity. By 2019, there won't be anything in newspapers that you can't get better online.
How is TechCrunch not a blog? Are the rules that if you're able to find advertisers and make money you're not a blog anymore? Because they don't make a magazine, they don't have print, and they publish exclusively online. That's exactly what a blog is.
I only half agree. What we think of as blogging will fall faster, but the idea of independent electronic publication will stick around longer than newspapers did. Flexibility trumps everything.
Actually TechCrunch is very much a blog, and not a "mainstream" media company, because it's not on print or tv or something people traditionally call the "mainstream", a definition that's changing rapidly.
Mainstream media is certainly not dying - the real killer of newspapers is and has always been TV. People seem absurdly blind to this now that the internet is dealing that last 2 HP of damage.
Is the New York Times dying? I hope not - currently on the first 2 pages of HN, 9 articles (good articles too, mostly) are from the Times. That's 15%! I'd hate to do without those.
This misses the elephant in the room: the majority of the Times article probably written by a PR firm, not by anyone employed at NYT. I've met several journalists that say it pretty bluntly - the only place to make a decent salary for a good journalist is in PR houses and think tanks.
The mainstream media is certainly not dying; the newspapers, and the television, however are.
People forget that a newspaper, or a magazine, or a television station aren't news sources; they're distribution systems.
Every day, I wake up and read things from: The Times Online, New Scientist, Scientific American, Wired, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, and probably more.
The paradigm might be changing shape, but it isn't going to be that different. Websites like this one become new-stands, and the distribution changes (from papers and trucks to packets and routers), but that is about it.
i e-mailed this. including it below in case anyone finds it curious.
'of course fake steve jobs is all caught up in the fact that he wrote a semi decent article for newsweek about this. but the failure at nyt is pretty epic. i remember reading their article on zynga last week and thinking -- wtf? are these guys even paying attention to anything? but investigative journalism is quite different from other types of journalism. but i will say about arrington that the two big points in his favor were (a) in his original riposte with shukla, he says in his second mic session, 'this will make good copy'. the fact that he knew that way back then is a sign that that fool has matured. he is way ahead of the game compared to any other tech journalist. (b) the video he found of pincus telling developers that he had scammed in the beginning was HUGE. forced facebook to force zynga to kill this entire lead-gen industry (or at least severely modify it). and that, truly, is the benefit of online journalism. a single journalist at a desk assigned to a single story can't find those videos. you need the power of hundreds of people reading articles and collaborating (some dude probably thought to himself -- hmm, wait a second, i remember i was at that startup talk a couple of years ago...).
on the other hand, the developers, whom fake steve jobs calls scammy or something -- i don't really think they quite realized the extent of what was going on. it doesn't shirk their responsibility to see better. but, now we know. and boy, mainstream media was completely out of the loop of this entire change in the tech industry. so let's blame them. jk, but the long-term and short-term benefits of reporting w/ and w/o serious editors is going to be a bigger and bigger issue.'
I wouldn't say it's "dying". Just being "reconverted", placed in another spot which is not the same than it used to be. Definitely not going to disappear in the mid-term.
i don't think blogs are beating regular news outlets because of some sort of unbias reporting. If blogs had the reach and power as mainstream news outlets they would suffer from the bias problem as well.
The true reason why blogs are beating regualar newspapers is because newspapers are trying too hard to win pulitzer prizes. Blogs give the same information but in a more convienent fashion that allows you to get the main idea with good commentary in a quick fashion.
So I think it has more to do with form and structure of content.
That's why blogs are winning, because you can go straight to these people with laser focused insights that you just can't get from a j-school grad. In the past, journalists would have to go to experts for comments and structure stories around that, now with blogs you get to cut out the middle man.
A lot of the good reporting I saw over the last year has come from experts. Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight was able to generate some really great analysis on election polls.
The crew at CalculatedRisk gave reported on the mortgage industry and financial crisis better than most mainstream outlets. Actually, Tanta over there used to have to regularly correct Gretchen Morgenson, one of the senior writers at the NYT.
With war reporting, Andrew Exum at AbuMuqawama was really really great on issues dealing with the Surge/Afghanistan/Iraq. I have to bet that one of the reasons is because he served as a ranger in Afghanistan and Iraq and then got a masters in COIN and a PhD studying Hezb.
These were instances outside of Tech where I saw some really good reporting. I think Tech media will always be ahead of everyone just based on the savviness of their consumers. You can really see that with the absolute embracing of video podcast programs by the tech crowd whereas in finance we still havent seen anything close to that for taking out trash like CNBC.