Hacker News Reader

Comment by trekking101 | Hacker News Reader

Anybody care to run the numbers on j-school grads at 'traditional' publishers v techcrunch et al? I stopped reading techcrunch years ago when it became clear they largely copied & pasted PR. Rarely do they ask competitors/industry pundits to comment, a standard journalistic practice.

View on HN

TechCrunch became just another blogspam outfit after Arrington left (or earlier, depending on who you ask). It still has some name recognition, which is why you sometimes see prominent VCs posting editorials there, but it's a shell of what it once was. It used to be a really good source of information but you were right to stop reading it years ago.

I wouldn't use J-School grads as a particular proxy for anything. I've known J-School grads who worked for various IT publications (though not for less conventional pubs like Techcrunch). But then I know a number of WSJ reporters and op-ed (as well as at least one person who moved from IT trades to general business) who don;t have J-School degrees. There are a lot of ways to learn standard journalistic practice without going to school for it.

Juts like CS schools, I think the quality could be dependent on the specific school they graduated from.

Is it though? I've never run across an MIT grad so maybe the uniformly kickass grammers are hiding further up the curve, but there have certainly been grads of top 10 schools who I naively deferred to (as a junior, self-taught programmer) only to later regret that deference.

This is a bit different. There are some accomplished programmers, software architects, etc. who don't have CS degrees, I think it's fair to say that they are in the distinct minority. On the other hand, I suspect that, among the top tier of journalists (admittedly difficult to measure), the majority--perhaps the great majority--do not have J-School degrees. There are better (e.g. Columbia) and worse journalism schools, for sure. But it's not the sort of prerequisite that other professional degrees can be.

My point is I would expect to find a heck of a lot more "journalists" working for a traditional media outlet than in the tech press

Reply on news.ycombinator.com