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).
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.
I find it endearing that you think there is some reservoir of "hard news" out there. Somewhere. Maybe in some corners of peer-reviewed science journals a significant fraction of the reporting is actually "hard news", other than that it's pretty much turtles all the way down.
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.
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.
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.
How, exactly, does this offer any insight into bloggers vs. mainstream media? Both of these camps blindly copied the story across the web, neither of them taking time to do any honest reporting. Sensationalism is bad, not mainstream media. Just as you can have a sensationalist paper and a rational blogger, you can also have a sensationalist blogger and a rational paper.
It is the bad reporting that should die - we shouldn't tie it to any particular format.
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.
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.)
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.
That's why I'm so impressed with NPR. Its depth of analysis is amazing compared to most other media I'm aware of in the US. And still. I still don't feel like paying for it.
I use NPR as a counter-argument to saying that good content will find a way to make lots of money. Show me how because I don't see it.
Investigative journalism does indeed have a lot of value. However, there seems to be this implicit idea floating around that the mainstream media spends a lot of effort on investigative journalism. This simply isn't so. At best a teeny tiny fraction of the efforts of the MSM goes into it. Which helps explain why bloggers can match or exceed the amount of investigation done by the MSM despite the dramatic differences in resources available.
Legitimate journalism does have value. But today the big media outlets serve up sugary teeth rotting cereal and try to pass it off as "part of this complete breakfast". If the MSM concentrated on delivering serious journalism they may be in a better position today. Instead they concentrate on rehashing rumor, regurgitating press releases and wire reports, and making sure everyone gets their fill of marmaduke and beatle bailey. For some reason, this latter strategy is failing them in a world of ubiquitous access to information.
I think the current problems will be good for the industry. Magazines I consider true investigative journalism is the Economist and CSM. The others I really don't care for and could get my news through Google anyway.
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.
