Saluting Walt Mossberg’s career | Hacker News Reader

Saluting Walt Mossberg’s career

qz.com

91 pointsartsandsci31 comments

I hate to be a hater, but I was never too impressed with Mossberg's reporting. My opinion is that his platform was stronger than his content. I suppose my claim is Mossberg was the New York Times Best Seller List of tech writing.

Any odds you could name a few journalists whose reporting you find more impressive than Mossberg's?

From a technical pov Anand Lal Shimpi perhaps? He didn't kill it on the prose or suave approach, but on the technical detail and exactitude.

The CPU guy from Ars Technica was extremely good as well.

Agreed.

He is, but it seems silly to compare him to Walt Mossberg. They do very, very different kinds of tech journalism.

Agreed, he was excellent.

Brian Klug also. Both at Apple now.

Jean-Louis Gassée (author of this piece on Mossberg) is one of my favorite commentators. He's just enough of an insider and yet also an oddball, which means he keeps it pretty real in an area that tends to be an echo chamber of fawning cultists.

Dan Gillmor did a lot of very astute writing (not necessarily just reporting, but also commentary) about many aspects of the scene in SV when he wrote for the San Jose Mercury-News. He didn't seem to care much for gossip or writing purely about personalities, and was more interested in cultural and legal effects of new technologies. I believe he's now occasionally writing for the Guardian, as well as teaching journalism at the university level.

Ben Thompson in my opinion is brilliant and extremely underrated (even for how popular he is).

Agreed. Ben has some of the best analysis out there.

Also worth reading:

* JLG (as already mentioned)

* Horace Dediu at Asymco

* Kontra at Counternotions – posts very infrequently but always insightful

I have to say I agree. I'm only familiar with his recent writings but they didn't strike me as very original or standout reporting, so I don't get the adoration. I also found some of his on-stage tech interviews rather lacking in depth and personality.

I'm probably wrong though, and I get the impression I would have had to follow his contributions from his early career through to his later work to truly appreciate his influence on the tech industry.

On-stage he was IMO ok, but the ATD interviews were lowered very much in quality by his co-host Kara Swisher. Why was she in that position again and again? Why two hosts for an interview at all?

Mossberg wasn't a "techie" in the sense of delighting in technology for the sake of itself, and so he wasn't that attractive to those of us that are. Rather he was a writer who appealed to people skeptical of technology and who wanted to know if a particular device would really be useful to somebody without a technical background for actual uses.

I 100% agree with you. When Mossberg left the WSJ this thread was on HN... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6414723

The tech press was then, and is now, a total joke compared to other forms of serious journalism.

I wrote this about Mossberg's colleague Kara Swisher a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8036679

I think my comments still stand.

The tech press is terrible at covering:

  - Energy Use/Efficiency of tech (not just laptops I'm talking datacenters, etc.)
  - Governance of the Internet
  - Privacy (until recently - sort of [and it still gets buried])
  - Software copyright issues
  - Market/monetary prospects for new tech 
    (I think the article sort of talks about the fear of 
     "crushing innovation")
  - Energy tech itself (new forms of power generation, batteries)
  - Tech in our lives (and I'm not talking about the fear card)
     - autonomous vehicles, medical devices, etc.

And Mossberg was and is part of the problem. It's pageantry for the common man rather than serious journalism.

Things have improved slightly since I wrote that 3 or 4 years ago but there is still waaaaaaay too much noise about Apple's latest widgets. Instead we should be hearing much more about the socioeconomic, political, and societal impacts that technology has and the fact that Apple's entire business model is centered around filling our landfills with their devices that become unusable with their latest version of iOS.

How can you Square writing that statement with the fact that Samsung (as just the foremost Android vendor) sells more phones than Apple, provides software updates for them for a fraction as long, has significantly shorter average device working lifetimes and doesn't come close to Apple's record on recycling? Yet you're picking on Apple. Name one device vendor that is doing more to address these issues? How can you be interested in this issue and not be perfectly aware of all of this?

Downvoted the truth. It's hip to hate on Apple. I thought folks here had a little more intelligence.

I don't think it's about intelligence. I really don't see how the poster can possibly not know all of this. So if that's true, why post a comment like that? I don't think it's anything to do with a lack of smarts, in fact quite the opposite. People who post stuff like that know very well what they are doing.

I didn't downvote him - as far as I know you can't downvote replies to your own comments.

P.S. The other smart phone manufacturers are just as guilty, but Apple makes the most profit from externalizing their costs. The other phone manufacturers basically lose money on the operation AFAIK.

Oh boy.

>Apple's entire business model is centered around filling our landfills with their devices that become unusable with their latest version of iOS.

Let's review - what devices run on iOS 10 - devices made during the past 5 years (iPhone 5 came out in 2012).

Of course, Apple still supports devices way farther back than then.

You're a big fat hypocrite if you're entire argument is that it's Apple's fault. But I guess talking about Android makers doesn't get the up votes.

A journalist among journalists.

He was probably Steve Job's most respected tech journalist. That's saying a lot. When the early iPhones launched, only a handful of journalists had a review device; Mossberg was one of them.

As opinionated as Jobs was, Mossberg was one of the few people where he would not criticize nor argue when Mossberg had feedback for Apple products.

Mossberg and Jobs were pretty close friends in Job's later years it seems.

Here's Walt Mossberg (nee Mosspuppet) interviewing Steve Jobs. Definitely NSFW. Tempus fugit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr4pPAn-m5g

By the way, the male equivalent of "née" that you're looking for is "né".

I didn't know there was a female/male distinction. In my defense, Wiktionary says: In the original French, the masculine form né should be used when the subject is masculine. In English, this distinction is not always followed.

But even ignoring gender I still kind of screwed it up. I was really going more for "a.k.a.".

And I'm quite sad that so many downvoted the Mosspuppet. I really loved that character. He really added some fun to the otherwise somewhat stuffy Walt Mossberg.

  And I'm quite sad that so many downvoted the Mosspuppet.

I bet most people thought you were coining a derogative term for Mossberg with the implication he was a puppet (mouthpiece) of Jobs/Apple. Not a literal puppet character. (I know I did.)

I was confused that the huge photo at the top of the article is not of Walt Mossberg.

Technically Mossberg was in the photo: he's out of focus on the right side facing away from the camera.

The original version of the article has an actual picture of Walt, and also the "majestic, elegantly curved Millau Viaduct with its cable stays spread like sails":

https://mondaynote.com/a-salute-to-walt-mossberg-e3c562288f0...

Wasn't there a story some time ago about the WSJ having run a hit piece at Apple's/SJ's behest, but using a different reporter's byline so as not to besmirch the Walt Mossberg brand? Apologies if I am misremembering...

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