Archive for July 2010
Responsible Technology Journalism
The biggest weakness of the tech journalism audience, a mental cancer, is lacking enthusiasm for new technology and bold ventures…
You wonder why people even read Techcrunch when they write comments like ‘Twitter is a waste of time’, ‘why even bother with Foursquare when Facebook will just kill them’, etc.
Enthusiasm, and even partisanship, is not what I decry as the lack of objective tech journalism. It isn’t like to political journalism; it better resembles scientific journalism: describing the latest images from the Hubble telescope, communicating a sense of wonder at the cosmos. The vocation of tech journalists should be to educate the public. And being enthusiastic is probably necessary to be effective.
I do think journalists should consider themselves public servants. What I dislike is sensationalism, gossip, and a lack of depth. Merely announcing how much money a company has raised, what features a product offers – with this journalists are failing to perform their duty.
It reminds me of Le Petit Prince:
Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: “What does his voice sound like?” “What games does he like best?” “Does he collect butterflies?”. They ask: “How old is he?” “How many brothers does he have?” “How much does he weigh?” “How much money does his father make?” Only then do they think they know him.
I work in a very narrow field that has unfortunate occasions of intense interest. MG Siegler wrote a terrible piece about an outage that Foursquare suffered. The thesis of the article: these clowns can’t keep it up when EC2 goes down on them! But he doesn’t ask the good questions: why did they go down when only one region of EC2 crashed? How do you do multi-region (i.e., multi-master) data-centers? How does a ramen-eating startup deal with suddenly being of historic significance and problems that took google 5 years to solve? Has Foursquare’s unusual technical choices (e.g., EC2, Scala) helped them innovate or increased risk or both?
This would not require long-form journalism. Just ask one question and get the opinion of a few experts. Or just ask a meaningful question and don’t try to answer it. This is not: “Update: 4 hours later Foursquare returns. Will they be another Twitter?’
Perhaps I’m bitter because I work for Twitter.
The audience, of course, lacks reading comprehension skills and any genuine empathy for machines. So there is this unfortunate paradox that the role of the press is to educate the public but the press will not do so until the public demands better and the public is too incompetent to demand anything worthwhile.
