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Comment by nir | Hacker News Reader

Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?

Eventually, each of them has the chance to make himself into an expert in his field. The journalism grad might also remember some stuff from her studies such as not to invest in companies operating in the field she covers, verify with several sources, try to get responses before publishing and so on.

I'd say that blogs are a huge disappointment exactly because they failed to fulfill the promise of reporting by those who know most. Instead we got reporting by the those who write most, which tend to be the Scobles and Arringtons of this world rather than the Cunninghams and Torvalds (Torvaldi? ;).

I think Fake Steve is among the sharpest commentator on this space, but he's completely wrong here, suggesting TC > NYT because something they threw out against the wall managed to stay stuck.

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"Does anything in Arrington's background make him better suited to cover technology than a journalism graduate?"

Demonstrably yes. The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed. He has done the work that they have not, and done it well. By those credentials, among his other work, he has proven his suitability to cover technology.

Blogs are not yet a replacement for all of mainstream media, but that is to be expected. Blogs are young, and profitable blogs younger yet (5-10 years at best), whereas the mainstream media is still a multibillion dollar centuries old institution. The fact that blogs are any competition whatsoever to the mainstream media is a shocking condemnation of the current state of mainstream journalism.

The entire J-school educated mainstream media has had the opportunity to do the story that Arrington has done, and yet they have failed.

I think this bears repeating. "A hot new fad sweeping the nation is deceiving your children and scamming customers for well in excess of $100 million per year" doesn't sound out of the purview of the NYT, does it? Instead of doing the ground pounding to shake out a story like that, they mainly get a press release from someone, open the Rolodex and find one of the usual suspects to give a punchy opposing quote for balance, and then publish it.

I think you're both reading way too much into the fact TechCrunch did a better job on this story than NYT. It's not unusual that some reporter will find or dig deep enough into a story that others hadn't. It doesn't prove that much.

The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky story, which nearly cost a US President his job - does this mean The Drudge Report is a better news source than the NY Times?

I would like to take the No Politics rule in response to that question, because my answer would tend to incriminate me.

The point of the article is that this is a specific example of a larger trend. Have you ever noticed that when the mainstream media covers some science or technology field you happen to have expertise in the coverage is always incredibly shallow and contains several glaring errors? You perhaps labor under the assumption that all of the rest of the media's coverage of subjects you have less independent knowledge of is unbiased, accurate, and thorough. What evidence do you have to support that assumption?

In truth there is very little reporting in the mainstream media these days. Most media conglomerates rest on the advantages of access and consumer inertia. The big papers would rather "report" on their content-free, uncritical exclusive interview with a major figure than actually do the grubby, uninteresting behind the scenes grunt work to break legitimate news.

Arrington has experience with successful startups and securities law. Perhaps that helps him scrutinize start ups better, especially for gauging their revenue prospects and drilling down the drivers for that.

That might have gotten him curious about how Zygna really made their money and led him to look at those rebill ads.

From WP:

Arrington grew up in California, USA and Surrey, England and graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a major in economics. He went on to Stanford Law School and graduated in 1995.[6] He practiced corporate and securities law at O’Melveny & Myers, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.[7] Arrington was co-founder of Achex, an internet payments company, which was sold to First Data Corp for US$32 million and is now the back end of Western Union online. His other entrepreneurial endeavors include co-founding Zip.ca and Pool.com, acting as chief operating officer for Razorgator, and founding Edgeio.

I would find it hard to rant about scams if I owned part of Pool.com. I suppose that's because my aversion to being a hypocrite outweighs my desire to sell ads on my blog.

Can you elaborate? Pool.com appears to some sort of domain name broker at the moment. While it may not be the most reputable business ever, it seems like it's a cut or two above scamming people into subscribing to some $10/month horoscope service under false pretenses.

The promise is/was not 'reporting by those who know most'. The promise is lower barriers, democratisation & meritocracy. Scobles & Arringtons compete against Cunninghams and Torvalds on equal footing.

If success is derived from or defined as 'most readers' (not obvious in the context of blogs), then it is mostly a consequence of who people want to read. But you don't need to be concerned with blogger success. You can read whoever wants to write.

That is the promise of blogs. Anything about what the content of blogs would be was always speculation. The promise is that anything can be thrown at the wall by anyone.

Some experts got thrown against the wall too.

It seems to me that the emphasis from Fake Steve is really more like NYT < bloggers in general, because the newspapers have lost their balls. They've gotten into bed with the politicians and corporations they report on (in some cases they're owned by the corporations they should be working to keep honest), and were doing just fine with their coke and hooker parties until technology began to pull the coke mirror out from under their nose and send the hookers home.

Just because it's fashionable to tear down Arrington and TC, doesn't mean that mainstream media should get a pass in the process.

I think Fake Steve is completely right here. And what he's really talking about has little to do with Arrington and TC.

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