Towards Better Technology Journalism

It's easy to poke holes in any form of journalism: it's performed by human beings who are fallible, with insufficient time or budget, about subjects which the journalist is at best only moderately versed, and helped out by sources with strong agendas.

For that reason, I'd much rather look at whether or not new forms of journalism are improvements and how the flaws fit into those improvements.

Take TechCrunch, which is a massive improvement on tech journalism for the simple reason that it gives us so much new content, but is also an easy target because they aren't afraid to post something before they have all the facts.

That rubs people the wrong way because traditional journalism is supposed to fact check or at least be based on concrete sources (although the sources don't have to be factual). That standard isn't going to work with blogs because they're putting out ten stories a day, where as NYT journalist might put three full days into a story.

So you see blogs like TechCrunch post stories that don't have all the facts lined up. Looking at an individual post makes it look like irresponsible rumor. But they don't stop with the one post. Putting out something inflammatory gets people responding and gets sources coming to them. Then they can follow up with more posts. In the sum, the posts make up a story that's closer to the truth.

It's sort of exploratory journalism and it seems to work well in other areas to, like political blogs. You see a ton of accusations on those, and some of them morph into full blown series.

I don't love the stories that are just rumor, but I think it's a big improvement overall because important stories are getting covered.