A New Year's resolution for tech journalists

Submitted by yelvington on January 1, 2012 - 9:00am

Here's a New Year's resolution I'd like to see made, and kept, by all tech journalists:

Report first, then think, then write. Don't skip the first two steps, and don't get them out of order.

Computer, networking and mobile technology is changing all of human society. Journalism about tech is important. But tech journalism today is a vast wasteland of plagiarism, rumormongering, empty snark, fanboiism, trolling, unfounded assumptions and whole-cloth invention.

A word of praise for messy innovation

Submitted by yelvington on December 7, 2011 - 5:22pm

Innovation can be messy. In fact, I'd go so far as to say innovation should be messy, if you want real progress.

In a piece of shallow pageview-trolling that's typical of tech "journalism," PC magazine is likening Google Chrome to Internet Explorer 6 (Satan's Web browser) because it's doing things other browsers can not, as yet, do.

Responding to the "Confidence Game"

Submitted by yelvington on December 2, 2011 - 7:51pm

If you care about the "future of news" debate, take a few minutes to read Clay Shirky's response to Dean Starkman's essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, which was titled "Confidence Game."

What strikes me most about the reactionary responses of the people Jay Rosen calls "the printies" is how often the acts of observation and analysis are identified and attacked as advocacy.

Gateways in the Chinese wall

Submitted by yelvington on November 2, 2011 - 2:55pm

In business, a Chinese wall is an information barrier that separates one part of the company from another. In newspapers, there's a Chinese wall between the journalism part (the newsroom) and the business part (advertising), and usually also the opinion part (the editorial page). Outsiders generally don't understand this, but left hand really doesn't know what the right hand is up to, and what's more, often don't want to know.