We need a new model for tech journalism
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Why is it weird that journalists have to sign an NDA to visit premises? Your job is explicitly to spread information and you're visiting a commercially sensitive area. I've worked with small companies (< 30 people) where entire floors were off limits if you didn't sign.
It's easy for a journalist to describe something without realising its importance within the community. There was an article recently about a tour of a Nikon lens factory and they were forbidden to talk or describe certain furnaces. If you weren't an expert in glass manufacture, you might let slip a key fact like "we saw a big machine before process Y" or "the glass at this point is red hot" (maybe everyone else has it orange-hot).
Why should any corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?
I've declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn't like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.
Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing.
Um, you seem to have missed this part:
>The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour.
See, there's more stuff in the NDA than what common sense dictates. You can't just agree to the parts you don't have problem with.
"We have shown X during the tour. Joe and Mary certify that. The article mentions X. This is a violation of the NDA."
Even if X was common knowledge, once you sign the agreement, you're setting yourself up for trouble if you do something you agreed not to.
Granted. Still, you don't know who's decent until it's too late. Even decent news organizations can hire utterly odious people, as in the Glass incident. Admittedly, that was more about making information up entirely, but the premise is valid: Even the best-respected news organizations could, potentially, ship you someone just untrustworthy enough that, without the immediate threat of an NDA, they'd leak.
Because that's where laws live: Most people would be largely decent without laws. Some few aren't decent even with very immediate penalties hanging over their heads. (This is a disorder in the DSM, in fact.) Others, some unknown fraction, are only decent because of law; that is, they lack much internalized morality, but they understand consequences well enough that laws keep them from doing bad things.
Correct me if I am wrong please, but it sounds like you are saying it's okay to trust corporations who are the subjects of media scrutiny to be the 'gatekeepers' of information, setting ground rules and defining what may or may not go into a news article. This is a horrifically bad idea if you care about journalistic integrity.
No harm in the corporation asking for that level of control, but I do not believe savvy journalists would accept. It is their (or their editor's) call to make, they must decide what the story is, and where the public interest lies.
Fair point about Nikon though, I think if you have a top-secret part of your factory that's just got to be permanently off-limits. Why risk it?
But at some point the tech companies will just say 'well then we don't want to interact with any journalists'. It seems today that tech companies certainly don't need journalists to help spread new feature announcements. I don't know why they bother talking to journalists at all already?
The actual issue, as highlighted by some other comments, is how sweeping the NDAs can be. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how testable these things are in court, but some of the clauses are so absurdly general that it would be almost impossible not to break them [1, 2].
There are valid reasons for showing people things they can't talk about. Even with an NDA, it's a strong statement of trust. You can also use it as a tool to build hype about an unreleased product, or to improve your relationship with the media. Who are journalists going to want to visit? The company that shows them cool toys, or the company that shows them meeting rooms and cubicles?
[1] https://cananian.livejournal.com/46914.html [2] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2017/01/does-googles-n...
Whenever I visited Google as part of the NYTimes I (as instructed) would decline.
Meetings still happened.
“The worker takes the red-hot glass and transfers it to...”
https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer/blob/master/READM...
The key thing this post is missing, is it talks about this as journalists could do better, as if these issues are simply a moral failing. Instead, the key issue is reader and economic incentives (like how tech journalism monetizes through conferences — and the importance of page views and virality).
Here's Nick Bilton talking about the things that influence tech journalists:
>“It’s a game of access, and if you don’t play it carefully, you may pay sorely. Outlets that write negatively about gadgets often don’t get pre-release versions of the next gadget. Writers who ask probing questions may not get to interview the C.E.O. next time he or she is doing the rounds. If you comply with these rules, you’re rewarded with page views and praise in the tech blogosphere. And then there’s the fact that many of these tech outlets rely so heavily on tech conferences. “If you look at most tech publications, they have major conferences as their revenue,” Jason Calacanis, the blogger and founder of Weblogs, told me. “If you hit too hard, you lose keynotes, ticket buyers, and support in the tech space.”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/theranos-silicon-val...
But it's kind of a weird and poorly constructed argument:
It’s easy to see why some readers would feel whiplashed by the current, critical coverage of Facebook and Google, which seems to come out of nowhere.
Whiplash ... came out of nowhere ... so journalists changed their view too fast then. Next sentence:
That’s our fault as journalists: We’ve been too slow to spot how things have changed
Wait, did journalists change their views on tech too fast or too slow? It seems to be both at once in this paragraph.
Later he appears to lament the historical dearth of "serious tech journalists", but he defines serious as journalists that "hold tech to account" which in turn simply seems to mean attacking them because they're big. I guess I'd use a definition more like "understands technology", with Jon Stokes at Ars Technica being a good example.
We do need a new model for tech journalism and indeed all journalism - we need journalists who are more interested in neutrally reporting accurate facts and news rather than engaging in poorly thought out social advocacy. Given the contents of this essay I'm not holding my breath.
Journalists are literally doing this all the time. What makes you think that engineers and doctors are the only people who have conferences? Also, if we're talking about industry, most tech conferences are hardly very self-critical (this is changing at some conferences) most are about selling products to developers / other people in the tech industry or self-promotion and recruiting.
That is the best summary of the problem I've heard yet. Much better than this article, for example.
Their conferences are less of circus and games usually and except academia they tend to be cheaper (conferences are expensive and I am not even sure they make you better) but the information exchange still exist.
Compared to software engineers at least, journalism has far more advanced professional ethics and procedures, including codes of conducts, mandatory disclosures, processes for spotting and correcting errors, independent watchdogs etc.
As but one specific example: here's a great article on the process that goes into editing a single article at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2018/06/how-to-copyedit-th...
Note the pages covered in red ink. Here's a similar photo from Der Spiegel: http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1175804-860_galleryfree-.... Note how every single word is required to be be checked and crossed out.
Editors rewriting things is no evidence of rigour, I'm afraid. I worked on a news story with one journalist at The Economist. I demonstrated to him that some of the claims circulating at the time on a particular topic were false and he accepted that my argument was correct. The final story made those same claims. The journalist apologised to me and said they'd been inserted by the editors (the claims in question were politically popular amongst the sort of people who write and read the Economist at the time).
So I'm afraid I'm far from ignorant about journalism. I've done a lot of fact checking myself and worked with journalists many times. The level of effort that goes into correctness in engineering is orders of magnitude greater than anything journalism even attempts.
I feel like we have lots more of those than you may be giving the industry credit for-or taken at face value, at least.
Journalists actually do have tech conferences and events, as well as blogs about the profession. Though the former are ridiculously expensive given their audience, making me almost wonder how any actual journalist could afford to attend one. It's not like in tech where someone can get a few hundred grand a year in some jobs, it's 'would struggle with rent in a medium sized town' level salaries.
What I mean is, what's the journalism equivalent of proggit or hacker news or arxiv - a place where people come together to debate the latest techniques for raising the quality of journalism on a massive scale? Do they have one? In all my years of reading I've never encountered a rigorous attempt by journalists to define new systems for better quality journalism or debate the decline in their trust.
If I was going to report on your comment, should I talk about how many sentences you wrote? How many uppercase letters you used. When you posted it? The italics? The fact that you posted on a website run by investors?
The world is a sea of facts. Choosing which ones to talk about is inherently subjective. The "view from nowhere" you espouse does not exist. That view, while purporting to be apolitical is deeply political, meaning "journalists" should write from a place that does not question any larger contexts.
Understanding tech and holding tech to account/having a point of view are not mutually exclusive. For instance, see Jon Stokes's takes on 3-D printed guns.
But sure, what journalism needs is "neutral reporting of facts."
F*ckin' engineers should spend less time debating React vs. Vue.js and try the humanities some time.
A better question is: how many journalists know how to code? Because that's the skill necessary to make sense of the world today and the massive volume of data it throws your way.
I don't expect completely neutral reporting, but I do expect some basic data literacy rather than anecdotes spun into narrative and repeated breathlessly from outlet to outlet. Plus, if we are awash in manipulation, I'd prefer to find that out from an independent source rather than a three letter acronym with a long rep sheet of human rights abuses.
The GDPR cookie debacle revealed this better than anything: what really drives the news industry now is tech, they're beholden to it. Plus, it's all third party. They no longer own their beat, the beat owns them. All the griping about FB and Twitter is exceedingly amusing to me for this reason. It's the news industry that capitulated, but is now chiding the rest of us for not having stood up, using the giants as a scape goat.
We need journalism more than ever, but journalism needs to get its shit together first.
But, it's annoying to get downvoted, and not always deserved. It's just not usually helpful, in my experience, to respond to it directly. You said something, others didn't like it. Either: 1) you said something true, but painful, in which case you don't need to repeat it, and responding just distracts from your original point, or 2) you said something that wasn't on target, in which case again complaining about the downvotes isn't constructive.
Yes, selection of facts is a place where bias can enter. But parking that issue for a moment, modern journalism is awash with false claims, retracted stories and repetition of clearly wrong statements made in interviews or by sources. In many cases, basic knowledge of statistics or even just using common sense would be sufficient to challenge the source, check the claim and drop it - but it doesn't happen.
There's such a vast gulf between the rigour you find every day in engineering and the mental sloppiness you find in journalism that I'm not even sure journalism can be reformed: your own post here indicates you never even tried.
Does that argument make sense?
That said, I don't believe his analysis is correct. I remember the short period of time in which coverage of Google and (a bit later) Facebook went from glowing to extremely nasty. It wasn't due to any sort of intellectual awakening amongst journalists. The cause was much simpler: Google launched Google News, and Facebook's news feed started to really begin kicking off major referral traffic to news sites.
Journalists and their editors started to realise:
a) How dependent they were becoming on G&F for traffic
b) How the decline in their profitability was terminal and not going to be easily turned around via some superficial "digital strategy"
c) How profitable these tech firms really were.
They started attacking G&F not due to any actual or real problems but as part of a negotiating tactic, which you can see still playing out today with the various EU attempts at a "link tax" which is really a tax on Google News. Rupert Murdoch in particular was decisive in this war because at some point he concluded that the iPad was the future of newspapers (because it looked like a newspaper) whereas Google News was a horrible dystopian future. I remember that once Murdoch gave a speech outlining this belief his stable of newspapers turned on a dime to begin attacking Google and praising Apple, often with the most spurious of stories. But hey, they thought (wrongly) that Big Tech was taking away their employment.
Tech news today is more like TMZ for the tech industry and all about either “coolness” or about “causes”.
But most of the organizations that can afford to cover tech news in-depth that may not be of that much interest to the general reader are behind (expensive) paywalls. They're analysts/consultants/etc. (As the Linley Group is with Microprocessor Report.)
"Phone manufacturer X should be embarrassed for putting a notch on their phone!!!"
What does that even mean... it's a phone....
Like complaining about a release crashing as breaking the build being unprofessional - while testing is a role internally it should compile and run at least beforehand.
Meanwhile 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7 catches fire' is objectively bad since a phone should never catch fire on its own unless perhaps it includes a self destruct feature (which needless to say would be very niche to be approved for sale).
The coverage that Google currently gets feels much like the coverage that Microsoft was receiving in the 90s and early to mid 2000s. There hasn't been a shift really, just Microsoft was relevant earlier.
1. Reporters acting more like cheerleaders for industry figures than journalists
2. Overly secretive companies with strict control structures.
3. Journalists being stretched thin as they're forced to cover too many stories at once in too many areas without getting the time to research them properly.
4. A lack of coverage regarding actual issues in the industry, or anything resembling investigative journalism.
5. Misunderstanding their audience in general.
But hey, I guess you could say many of the issues are really true of most niche or entertainment focused media.
You've described the problems of ad-sponsored media. If you actually paid for your news, all these problems would go away.
We all did. They were called magazines, and you paid for subscriptions. There were gaming magazines, tech magazines, music and TV magazines, celebrity gossip magazines, etc. Most of them had many of the same issues as modern sites for those topics.
Still, the Columbia Journalism Review is right about the need to rethink how news outlets cover "tech." Too much tech journalism fills space and time with breathless playback of the founding myths of companies, or breathless coverage of scandals.
The big Sili Valley companies are big enough to deserve the same kind of journalist scrutiny as outfits like GM, Proctor&Gamble, and Cargill. Some business journalists specialize in finance, while others specialize in product, distribution, employment, regulatory, and the like. It certainly makes sense for some to specialize in software and telecom, but those fields apply to Cargill just as much as they apply to Google or the stealth startup in the incubator.
It's common for business journalists to accept embargos on stories, holding off publication until a certain, and near, date. This is quid pro quo for early access. But the moment they accept long term confidential disclosure agreements is the moment they stop being journalists. If we don't want our trade secrets in the media, we should not show them to journalists.
There are also often incentives to be provocative rather than "just the facts." But that's another issue related to incentives.
I suspect that they are largely mis-motivated as part of the issue - one doesn't become a music star just by wanting to be famous yet they are focused the most on clicks. Similar to how just having as a goal to sleep with people isn't a very good approach to being sexually desirable. Some real soul searching would be needed to rise to the top again - a fundamental desire to inform people first and then financial success may follow ironically if they don't care about it. I doubt that the existing institutions are capable of it because they are fundamentally businesses and asking them to stop caring about profit is about as absurd as asking a peasant to stop caring about food.
Except that Google isn't quite 20, and Facebook is like 15. Amazon is almost 25. Meanwhile Apple is what? 40+?
It might just be nostalgia goggles but I remember magazines like Popular Mechanics and Wired going into intricate detail whenever they reviewed or covered a product. Graphics and charts explaining how exactly things worked, instead of just regurgitating the company's "about" page.
that's because a lot of it is advertisement. Paid posts are rampant, but so is lazy "journalists" simply copy and pasting press releases, maybe re-wording a couple phrases to make it seem like their own writing.
Journalists were very happy to help Facebook while it was profitable for them and now that Facebook has obviously turned against them, suddenly they have a moral epiphany.
I wonder if the journalists who lined their pockets by promoting certain startups while working for tech publications like TechCrunch, Venture Beat and the others will also have a similar moral epiphany some day... Probably not.
https://content.production.cdn.art19.com/episodes/1454f1b6-4...
I'll beef hooked if I'm going to read an article about what "tech journalism" needs from a site that already shit the bed IMO.
Gaming is huge. Absolutely huge. Why do you think that games journalism is not only niche, but extremely niche?
I feel like there's more games journalism journalism than just games journalism,
?
I can't really speak to whether or not its niche in an objective sense (i.e. the readership of games journalism), but it may seem that way because the stakes are so low. Games are essentially just entertainment and the availability of accurate information about them is not nearly as important as information about the functioning of government or the actions of large companies that can impact your life.
It also (like most entertainment media) has a large audience, hence the amount of discussions. And that's what gets people discussing it.
It's the same reason sports journalism is so big online compared to its real world impact. Lots of people are interested in the field, regardless of how it affects 'more important' things.
Can you point me to a single piece of significant reporting on video games, that came from within the "video games journalism" industry? i.e. not just reviews or rumours about upcoming games, but actually breaking a story that holds people or companies accountable for something in a way that had a lasting impact?