Tech Journalism is Broken
stupidiswinning.tumblr.com
stupidiswinning.tumblr.com
Consequently we find product reviews that are checklists of features, composed by writers who lack all insight or understanding of the subject. And outlets all-but-plagiarizing each others' regurgitated press releases.
(The disease isn't universal, of course. Some sources -- for example, anandtech.com -- get pretty close to the old-school hardcore reporting from time to time. Others actually cover industry movements from an informed perspective. But the drive to get eyeballs on ads is inimical to insight; it encourages facile, superficial, and above all speedy publication with a smattering of titillating headlines to draw the readers in. And it does us all a huge disservice.)
((Disclaimer: I spent years doing this for a living. I also have a CS degree, circa 1990 vintage. I may be viewing the old days through rose-tinted spectacles ... but I don't think so.))
I'm speaking for myself and not from either company. But I can tell you though everyone in the industry is aware of the problem and trying to get away from re-writing to produce more original content.
The problem, as I see it, is that volume drives most online publishing. Making money depends on having updates throughout the day. That means every writer needs to post something every day -- usually more than one thing a day.
Even though most of these quick hit stories don't get many pageviews individually, they add up, and occassionally even a quicky will become a "blockbuster" that gets a huge number of pageviews. Original stories get a more consistently high number of hits, but they take much longer to produce.
I'm not sure people appreciate how much time it actually takes to write this stuff. Even doing quick hit journalism takes time. For example, I spent a couple hours this week on a post about Solr 4.0. It's short, and it's based entirely on the announcement/feature list but it still took a couple hours to write.
I have a bunch of original stuff I'm working on, but quick hit posts cut into the time I spend on those stories. At least part of that is a time management issue on my part -- and I'm a slower writer than many of my colleagues -- but I expect that juggling the needs to publish daily with longer form work is an issue for many tech bloggers.
(You should also not underestimate the amount of time we spend filtering information and looking for new -- e-mail, briefings, competitors sites, Twitter, etc.)
Anyway, I think things are slowly changing for the better thanks to reader demand for better content. But there's also a need to balance completeness of coverage with original work.
It's funny that Wired was singled out because I think they/we actually have a really good original content to re-write ratio (though yeah, Wired's always been known for sensationalist headlines). TechCrunch and Business Insider both have lots of original content as well. Because BI does so much volume I think people overlook the original stuff.
Another note about rosy retrospection: I don't want to defend the rewrite churn, but I do want to point out that even most daily newspapers have a significant amount of non-original content. Instead of re-writes though they tend to rely on newswires and syndicated columns and comics.
Re-writes aren't just done to get a quick post, they're also done to point readers to stuff they might not otherwise read -- as jbrodkin points out, not all TC readers read TorrentFreak. There are otherwise of getting this sort of stuff out -- like maybe just doing a linkblog that points directly to a story run elsewhere. In some cases it's possible to just call the original source and get the story so you don't have to link to/re-write a competitor's work -- I do this when I can but it slows things down (example: my story on Elbrus Technologies for Wired ran two days later than all our competitors because I waited for people from the company to get back to me instead of just basing my story on the EETimes report).
So yeah, it's getting better, everyone's worried about it but it's not simple to fix.
The only time this didn't happen was when there was a pre-brief and an embargo, which we usually got a head start on anyway.
Arrington was strict on this rule and that was his editorial style. If you talk to any writer from that time period ('06-'10) they would each have a half-dozen stories to share of stories they had been working on being stopped because somebody else published the same story first. It didn't even need an instruction from editors, it was just understood.
(this isn't a comment on the 'new' Techcrunch, I actually like it, the rewrite content doesn't get in the way of good original content from being written, and it usually adds new information to a story).
Amongst the cabal of editors, PR and companies the racket was positive coverage in return for access.
At least today we have viable independent sources who can build an audience without giving a crap about access or offending PR people.
Those magazines were also hard to get, I would travel by bus to a larger library in the city, or download what was available via BBS. Everything that was mainstream such as the PC mags was just complete garbage. You were lucky to get 300 words in a tech section, and even then it would be something simple like teaching a DOS single command each issue.
For me that has been replaced by HN, reddit, other aggregators and a much broader range of sources. The difference now is that there is enough high quality content that I could spend 12 hours a day reading it, whereas 15 years ago I remember I would read all the magazines within a week or so and then eagerly wait out the following 3 weeks for the next issue to arrive.
There is so much high quality content on the web now. If there is any complaint, it should be that it is difficult to find and surface. I would love a pure technical, programmer oriented community that is not news related but rather just interesting advanced tech related, picking out old good stories from those good sources or finding real gems in individual blogs.
Most online communities and aggregators are too focused on content from the past 15 minutes. Even an article published 24 hours ago is seen as 'old news'.
Of course, some of the websites still do that :-) But you really need to add original reporting or analysis today to stand out.
They're great examples through. Exactly the kinds of reasons I got out of tech journalism.
E.g. most of what is written about Apple.
The Wired story has some interesting comments from a very important person in the tech world. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it seems fine to me.
I'm not a TechCrunch fan, but this particular story relays some interesting information that people might not have read if they read TechCrunch instead of TorrentFreak. I've quoted TorrentFreak in some of my own stories, it's often a good source. There are so many worse examples from TechCrunch that could be used to make the case against tech journalism, but I'll just point out one: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-coulda...
Agreed on the BI and Mashable examples. Funnily enough, the Mashable one could have been good if it showed the actual evolution of Windows user interfaces rather than stupid illustrations of people sitting at desks.
If anyone wants a great parody of awful tech journalism, I suggest following this person on Twitter (I especially love the picture, which is a parody of the guy who started Mashable): https://twitter.com/nexttechblog
Are unpaid comments and blog posts, however, not asymptotically approaching/surpassing their quality?
What about signal/noise ratio?
And no blogger can reasonably write often enough on an array of subjects wide enough to keep the level of a news site, unless she takes in some other authors, and at that point there is not a lot of difference.
Also, there are still many sites that are widely above 90% of the blogs, such as ARS o the reg.
There are many interesting tech blogs (acangiano's is one :) ) but they don't fill everything that tech journalism should be.
It's true there's a lot of crap out there, but this has always been true in the journalism world. And it's true that many sites have dubious practices that are 100% for reasons that don't matter to readers, like advertising and SEO. But is that the journalist's fault -- or the system's?
I speak to editors and writers regularly as part of my work at Parse.ly, and many of them are extremely worried about being "dinged by Google". They also hire experts who read the tea leaves on declarations from Matt Cutts and the Google search team, hoping to come up with a strategy that will make Google treat their site as one of several "blessed" domains.
Why? Showing up well in SERP pages or Google News can often be the difference between an article that fizzles and one that garners thousands of eyeballs.
The problem with SEO isn't that some editors/writers do it. The problem is that it works. And, it often has nothing to do with the quality of your content.
It's like complaining that public stock markets are "broken" because some companies goose accounting numbers to look better to investors (e.g. Groupon). Yes, some do, but not all companies. No system is perfect.
I would like to start a curated list of high quality journalism sites with a policy of delisting the sites that go The AOL Way, given sufficient evidence provided by users. It would be awesome if we could remove the profit motive from stooping to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
If a website is not behind some kind of paywall, he lives on ads and must enter the crazy linkbaiting/SEO dance.
I guess it's more noticeable to us within tech, because HN generally aggregates a fair amount of content from TechCrunch, and Mashable, and so on, and it's not unusual to see four or five links to these things every day.
A solution is to post and upvote the original source where possible, and hope it attracts more discussion than the churn does.
[0] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distor...
It's just a spinoff of TechCrunch in both its origins and content. It's like the Joanie Loves Chachi to Happy Days.
I'll just assume you're joking.
What annoys me most are the "news" posts about startups that throw around all these insane numbers that aren't even remotely realistic. Six months later people are surprised that the company is "pivoting" or is nearly bankrupt.
More often than not they simply wait for the next press release by X company and present it as if its hard hitting news then move on to the next post.