The problem with the tech media is not that they don't understand tech. It's that they don't understand *business*
One of the mottos we used to have at The Economist was "foreign everywhere", which is to say that our mid-Atlantic ideological perch gave us enough intellectual distance from any particular country and culture that we could see the big picture that more parochial locals could not.
This anthropological approach still works great for the Economist, since it is native not to a country but a worldview -- classical Anglo-Saxon liberalism; "free people, free markets" -- and can bring that lens to all that it sees.
But elsewhere, the era of "journalist as anthropologist", "journalist as critic", and, even worse, "journalist as self-appointed defender of the public interest" is now less and less tolerated, as a series of interesting articles (Vicki Boykis's Nomcore, Hunter Walk) and threads (Balaji Srinivasan) this week make clear. As loathed as the "MSM" may be by the Right in American politics, the tech press is even more loathed in Silicon Valley, as Mike Issac from the NYT pointed out this week.
Why is this? My own view on this, as a former journalist (Nature, Science, The Economist) and editor (Wired) and now tech CEO (3DR), is that the easy complaint -- journalists aren't technical enough to understand what they're writing about -- is not the real explanation. It's not that journalists don't understand technology, it's that they don't understand business. And this is not by accident: they have been expressly walled off from the business side of their own companies in an effort to protect journalistic independence from advertising pressure, which now seems like a quaint affectation of a bygone era.
But now that traditional media is falling apart and a few brave journalists have become entrepreneurs, we're starting to see an alternative, which paints the myopic failures of traditional business journalism in stark light. As someone who has sat "on both sides of the table", like Jessica Lessin of The Information, I'd say the real blind spot in business journalism is understanding that all companies, even the big successful ones, are a shitshow inside. That's not evidence that they're corrupt or malevolent or necessarily mismanaged. It's just that business is messy, and fast-moving businesses trying to do something new are even messier.
Few journalists have raised venture capital, run a board meeting, made (or missed) payroll, or even been responsible for the revenue side of their companies (which is traditionally left to the "publisher"). That's the perspective they lack, and why their criticisms, even well-founded, come across as finger-waggy and piling on, based on the accounts of disgruntled ex-employees airing their grievances on Glassdoor, or competitors exploiting journalistic naiveté to undermine rivals.
In the Margaret Mead days, anthropology, despite its biases and observational flaws, was still an enlightening introduction to people and cultures we knew nothing about. But the tech industry and its people have their own megaphones now, and they no longer need anthropologists to tell their story nor are they accepting of the distortions that come with that.
I hope out of this breakdown in tech media we get more media entrepreneurs like Jessica Lessin and Henry Blodget, a Wall Street Analyst turned media entrepreneur with Business Insider, who are truly bilingual, native to both worlds. It's hard to do -- between media's fin de siecle self-loathing and the world's loathing of it, it's not a happy place to be, much less to start a new company in. But if there is a way to regain respect and trust between Silicon Valley and the "Fourth Estate", these few pioneers across the "church and state" divide seem the ones to do it
Great article Chris! Sometimes it seems that the job of CLevel folks is to present a narrative that will be effectively parroted by the MSM. Those that do it well can raise money by manipulating the press.
Principal, LGTM LLC Communications Services
4yExcellent. The most useful training I had as a business journalist was the three years I spent as a traveling salesman (books, Asia.) Asking people for money is the heart of business, it and all that leads up to it are deeply emotional, and an astonishing number of journalists have never experienced it.
Entrepreneur, author, bookseller, badass
4yAs a (happily former) journalist who also spent more than 10 years building media companies and double that time writing about startups, I can definitely attest that building a company yourself gives you a perspective you don't have otherwise. But I'm not sure it made me better at covering tech. I think what made me good at covering tech was working at publications that allowed me to spend months reporting out stories. That didn't have me on a constant deadline clock so that I could roam around spending hours in a single meeting over lunch that may or may not wind up in a story. I know that I gained a good perspective on business before joining TechCrunch or starting Pando, because there were precious few surprises for me. The thing that was different was having lived the intense emotions around things. I think a huge problem is the pace reporters have to keep, the volume they have to put out and how that short cuts reporting that builds a deep base of knowledge around an industry. I would point out that most people "in Silicon Valley" have also never done those things-- LIKE MANY PEOPLE WRITING CHECKS! not to mention many of the people who complain about journalists not getting it ;) It is always easier to criticize, yes. But that doesn't mean there isn't a valid place for good criticism. I also don't think you need to know how to make a financially successful film to be a film critic. The job of a critic is -- in a sense-- to advocate for the consumer. That consumer shouldn't have to care about the box office pressures of appealing to a Chinese audience, say. They should expect to see a good film. I always get a little suspicious when I hear industry people throwing the tech press under the bus... in my experience, at any publication I've worked at, that universally happens when the reporter is onto something and the people in question are either blind to it or don't want it out there. I'm not saying it's always the case when people have issues with journalists, but the converse is true: It is almost always a reaction when a journalist is exposing something that doesn't want to be exposed. What I find interesting is how many people also spend their time trashing journalists who set out to build companies, so I'm happy to see some defense of that here! My bigger issue with tech journalism -- which I see cycle after cycle-- is the easy cop outs of going with the flow. Everyone hates tech! Everyone loves tech! Everyone hates tech! We were writing about a lot of the issues with tech and it's intertwined nature with politics, the issues with things like the vision fund, the issues with bro culture, etc etc etc well before it was cool and it's not because we were any smarter or better sourced, it was because we were willing to deal with the fall out, the threats and the lack of access that comes with it. That is a big reason that I am happy to have finally left journalism for good. It's a horrible horrible life and I don't think the empathy or understanding for THAT exists on the other side either ;) You are only doing your job if a lot of people are pissed at you. And trust me, when you have the potential to impact someone's valuation, things get incredibly ugly and nasty FAST. People will say anything to discredit or bring down a journalist who might threaten their ability to raise that next round-- I have seen that unclose for 20 years. I got trashed for everything I did as a journalist by someone consistently for 20 years. And that didn't change when I became a founder!
Director Of IT | Infrastructure Management, Disaster Recovery
4yChris Anderson, It's easy for the layperson to assume the "breaking" story is just a write up of what a manufacturer told the crowd of writers. Of course, that exists but the truly inspiring, the bold, the "shake the branches" journalist spends countless hours pursuing a story. I think the main problem is anyone can be an author on the internet. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can be anything, as long they get the hits. Journalism, like most writing, is no longer a unique skill, it's a commodity traded like wheat or corn. The truly powerful writing, at least for me, has been to captivate an audience of potential clients via a proposal or an artistic presentation that screams "we understand you" and even more importantly, "we understand your target." I believe the younger crowd has the ideas but the older mentors (like myself and most likely you) have the knowledge to present something awesome and unique. It's when that pair comes together in a subtle harmony that explodes into an Aria that the magic happens. Without that, writers are just part of a flat signal that barely rises above the noise. For the record, I have been on both sides of this. I've been the decision-maker on hard choices and I've been the recipient of the same. Running a business is not as easy as it seems and my knowledge of that has only helped me.
Biztech/biotech journo. CrazyStupidTech, @Wired, @NYTMag, Author "Dogfight: How Apple and Google went to war ....." , ex @FortuneMagazine, @USNews, @WSJ.
4yI wonder if an equally large problem is that our sources and readers have little understanding of what we actually do - how many calls we make to report a story, how long they take to write, how much editing goes into them if not on deadline, and how big magazines like Wired have an entire team of fact checkers that practically rereport each story before it can be published. When we controlled the megaphone we never felt the need to explain any of this. Now, it's essential because our sources, readers and subjects have large megaphones of their own. Like any industry under public pressure, we need to do a better job of explaining our story. Makes me wonder how much of the antagonism we 're talking about here is driven by our increased sloppiness, and how much is driven by the fact that it's just easier for our sources and readers to scream at us.