Comment by jonstokes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonstokes | Hacker News Reader

Mossberg did a lot of good work, but so did a lot of other columnists who didn't attain nearly the status he did.

Mossberg mostly has one guy to thank for the unique place he occupied in the tech media scene: Steve Jobs. For whatever reason, Jobs decided that Mossberg's take on Apple products really mattered, a lot. Mossberg was Jobs's stand-in for Mr. Everyman, and Jobs seemed to believe that if Mossberg couldn't connect with a product, then it needed to be re-thought.

His status as anointed deliverer of the final verdict on Apple's product line gave Mossberg a massive amount of influence in the tech world all by itself, but added to this was the fact that, as with so many other things, the rest of the tech industry slavishly followed Apple's lead -- at least, the rest of the tech industry's PR departments followed it. For a corporate PR flack, having Jobs's own personal oracle say nice things about your product was the ultimate win. It was the fat Harvard admissions envelope, by which I mean something like, "this achievement, while important, has a way outsized significance to a certain segment of the population who compete for it because they've all decided that getting this particular thing means You Won and have a higher status than all of your peers who haven't gotten it."

Interestingly enough, the passing of Jobs was followed by the passing of the positive Mossberg review as the ultimate prize in the PR world, and Mossberg's departure from the WSJ didn't help.

Am I ripping on Mossberg? Not really, more like I'm ripping corporate PR, but Mossberg certainly cultivated this situation (who wouldn't, though). I will say that it was a source of eternal frustration (and envy) among the rest of the tech punditry that Mossberg's reviews had this bizarre status with the PR departments of the companies we covered, sort of like "Harvard as the agreed upon brass ring that all yuppie parents have decided to compete for" no doubt occasions much eye-rolling at Stanford, Brown, Yale, and everywhere else. Nobody is sad to see that era pass.

As for Mossberg himself, Godspeed, dude. May your amulet never tickle.

Thank you for articulating what was behind the Mossberg phenomenon in a positive way. An anecdote:

About a decade ago, I was working at a startup. The VP of Marketing got it into his head that we just had to get Mossberg to write about us and it'd be great for user acquisition. We had a bunch of meetings and shuffled and reprioritized the product roadmap around this. I'd actually not heard of Mossberg before, as my prior experience was at a BigCo selling to enterprise, a market where Mossberg was essentially irrelevant. So I went and read a few of his past columns, and felt that the quality of insights was all over the place, ranging the whole gamut from good to middling to bad. At this point I was wondering in my head "Why is this guy so special? Who crowned him this way? Why are we doing contortions to attempt to please him?"

Our strategy did work, insasmuch as Mossberg wound up writing a glowing column about us. However, this did nothing to do move the needle at all with regards to user acquisition, and likely was a distraction and misallocation of resources that negatively impacted finding market fit. This left me with a bad taste about Mossberg, as clearly whatever his tastes were didn't fit the market very well. The review might have helped us if we were raising a series A or B, but we were in C territory by then, which is when investors actually look to see if you have a viable business rather than responding to hype and FOMO.

In retrospect now, after reading your comment, the bad taste I felt was really about our VP of Marketing, who was chasing a prize that in the end didn't help the business. Said VP was ineffective in other ways, and this was just one symptom of his ineffectiveness. Mossberg was just playing the cards he was dealt in life effectively, and as you said, who wouldn't?

I think you may have cause and effect flip-flopped here - Mossberg was the everyman's tech columnist long before Apple became the hot thing to cover.

I think he got it right. Mossberg was one amongst a number of everyman tech columnists for a while, but Jobs really elevated him once Apple got popular.

This is exactly right. Most major (and many regional and local) newspapers had an Everyman tech columnist. Mossberg just happened to be that guy for the WSJ.

The other thing I maybe should've mentioned, though, was that Mossberg was a very early and emphatic booster of the Jobs 2.0-era Apple products. Back when Jobs had just returned after the Next acquisition, Mossberg got on that bandwagon immediately and began talking up their products.

So in its initial stages, the Jobs/Mossberg love-fest was a bit of a symbiosis. Recall that this was in a bygone era when the powerhouse WSJ at least as big of a deal as the struggling Apple Computer company. In later years, when Apple was the giant we now know and Jobs had ascended to the pantheon of industrial greats, the relationship probably did a lot more for Mossberg than it did for Jobs.

(It's hard to recall, but there was once a time when Apple was a niche, struggling little tech company with a minuscule market share, and big newspapers were still a Big Deal. The Jobs/Mossberg relationship had its roots in that era.)

Nope, tech columnists pre-Mossberg were largely targeted at enthusiasts, he basically invented the everyman tech columnist gig.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/04/12/mossberg-cjr

What has always been fascinating to me is this. If critics options matter that much why can't they make more money just offering those opinions directly to the company by way of high priced consulting?

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