The problem with tech journalism
I came across this nonsense on tech journalism recently:
A clodpated former reporter for WaPo, Vox and Ars Technica (Timothy B. Lee) attempts to lecture us on the problems with tech journalism. This is fun stuff as this Princeton-educated ninnyhammer doesn’t seem to be conversant in the English language terminology associated with his profession. Consider:
The first few paragraphs of a news story — known as the lead
It’s actually known as the “lede.” The word “lead” (which he misuses 5 times) is both the heavy metal and the information source reporters are supposed to chase down, not the opening text of an article on a subject.
One approach: Identify an emerging technology that has the potential to be the “next big thing.” …. Reporters pitching these stories to their editors have an obvious incentive to exaggerate the importance of the technology or company they are writing about. And once they’ve started work on a story, they have a strong incentive not to ask too many skeptical questions.
There’s a couple more reasons he never mentions for reporters rampant lack of skepticism in tech articles (or anything else). The most obvious one is that tech reporters are fairly low IQ people who are incapable of constructing any useful skepticism that would help anybody. This lack of intelligence also tends to bleed over into a general lack of confidence: when they look around and see everyone praising, say, quantum computing or autonomous vehicles, they of course wouldn’t dream of contradicting all those “smart people.” Hell they don’t even know the difference between a “lede” and a “lead” -how are they supposed to know when autonomous vehicle companies are faking it?
Beyond that there is the fact that there are 6 public relations professionals (aka professional business propagandists) for every reporter in the country. As I have said before, this ratio is even more unfavorable in tech reporting; if you include marketing people in with PR people, its probably 1000:1 against tech reporters. The ensuing human information centipede is the main reason why clowns like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes got as far as they did: the reporters were overwhelmed by this denial of reality attack by the PR propagandists. Many PR people take the obvious shortcut of simple bribery: I’ve been there when it happens. $20k is peanuts compared to a PR person’s salary, but you can get some pretty good stuff in print for that kind of loot. Tech reporters and their editors need money too. They also need coke and hookers -it is more plausibly deniable than stacks of cash changing hands, and more fun for the PR person.
Everyone just assumes this doesn’t apply to them
I’m sure it’s well beyond simple bribery. For example, nobody talks about the ebay stalking scandal any more, but I’m 100% sure this isn’t the only time this sort of thing has happened to reporters. The stakes in that case were much lower than most of the business we’re talking about, and it only involved a couple of obscure bloggers grousing. It is of course a lot easier to ruin an employed reporter’s life than a couple of self employed bloggers.
Conversely, reporters love to catch big companies doing something illegal, unethical, or anticompetitive.
Untrue: contemporary reporters mostly love nonsense “gotcha” moral preening baloney against perceived enemies in the endless culture wars. The example Lee correctly mentions is a vacuous but negative article about Uber in 2014 being not very helpful to anyone’s understanding. What he forgets to mention is why numskull “reporters” hated Uber back then. Uber was the enemy in 2014 because its founder once called it “Boober” as a weak nerd joke in a GQ interview. This means he was probably a normal male of the human species rather than the type of castrato favored by the present regime and its reporter toadies, but it was enough to spin up the hate machine. Since the chowderhead who wrote a negative article about Uber doing normal business things couldn’t get in on the “Boober” scandal a few months earlier, he did the next best thing: he made up a bunch of self righteous but nebulous indignation about how they conduct their business. Later on Boober got into trouble for not buying the wife of another fraudster a leather jacket in a size which was flattering to her figure while she was employed there. She’s now a tech reporter, water finding its level no doubt, but she did manage to get Uber’s founder fired, ultimately, for saying “Boober” in an interview back in February of 2014.
Oh noes boober-sayer, wouldn’t you rather hear from Zuck instead?
And now, curiously …. nobody seems to dislike Uber. I never cared that Travis said “boober” or didn’t buy Susan Fowler a more flattering size of jacket, though I could see NPCs around me who really cared a lot about these things. I only started using Uber in Europe around 2021 because they’re usually better than taking the taxi. The NPCs don’t seem to mind them any more either. I bet Uber has done plenty of actually shitty things one could report on, but nobody does because its present CEO is some Iranian sleazebag who used to work for sleazebag gangster Barry Diller, rather than a goofy nerd boy who says things like “boober.”
Contra Lee’s assertions, corporations are mostly accorded ridiculous leeway in all mainstream reporting despite overt and rampant criminality at almost all levels of American society. This apparently happens because they ape platitudes which make NPCs happy. That, PR disinfo, bribery and darker means: I’m pretty sure anyone at risk of surfacing something shitty regarding present Uber would lose their jobs or worse. Diller is mostly a gangster as far as I can tell, and I assume his protegee is no better. If going after gangsters is too scary for you: simply explaining in a couple of paragraphs any of the half dozen criminal cartels that make up the US health care system is a socially useful thing to do: no mainstream publication has ever done this to my knowledge. Nobody talks about chemical companies either: how the fuck do chemical companies get good press? Ya, you know it: PR and bribery (and worse). Hell even arms manufacturers get decent press now a days, after all they’re into diversity and inclusion while their products blow up middle eastern and eastern European subhumans who obviously deserve it for being insufficiently diverse and inclusive.
we make shit that kills people, but we like the black people!
The awkward reality is that tech journalism is the way it is because that’s mostly what consumers want.
Nah, there are plenty of people who would prefer adult tech journalism. They’re not going to pay for a Princeton educated blockhead who doesn’t know the difference between “lede” and “lead” to regurgitate tech PR platitudes at them. Lots of people would like to know what’s actually going on in the technology world, if only to work at a company or on a problem likely to succeed. Lots of these people have money. Investor types don’t care so much these days: using the magic of public relations they more or less create their own realities, but there are middling rich people who want to know. Generally people who want to figure out the world don’t rely on clowns LARPing as smokestack-and-telegraph era reporters, they form closed communities or rely on people like me who do boob dissection for sport rather than as vocation. All reporters prefer the central model as they think it accords them some status, but it doesn’t: not any more. To actually report things you have to remove the letter P and the letter R from the truth, and these days, official “journalism” is just a cloaca for pumping PR propaganda lizard shit into people’s brains.
Locklin on science 
Tech journalism has developed the usual mass media disease: journos want to reach as many people as possible, so even the few smart ones dumb down their articles and use clickbaits.
The scientists, the ones who should be reaching out for the truth, are also to blame, as most of them write papers that few outside of their narrow circle can comprehend (including the dumb journos), and use all kinds of jargon to obfuscate their research in order to make it sound more complex, so they can justify their research grants. Rotten, isn’t it? Why it has to be so unpleasant to read a science paper nowadays, with half of it usually referrering to other people’s work instead of using a paragraph or two to explain a concept? I know it may hurt some researchers’ feelings if you don’t do that, but it just turns off lots of people who are otherwise curious and want to learn someting new.
I’m not sure how the system can be changed – the mass tech media seems hopless, at the end they will all try to reach the masses and need vester interest’s money. Perhaps the future belongs to bloggers – I’m following a list of people that write interesting articles and explain the world in a decent way, many of them “real” scientists, not leeches whose main goal is to parasitize grants.
I wrote legitimate “tech journalism” in the 1990s – including a weekly column about the Internet for the Toronto Star that had to, as they would later say, pivot when Berners-Lee et al. invented the Web – and I remain mildly miffed that I was offered but one junket. (By Sun Microsystems. I should have said yes.)
You’d be amazed how many technology bloggers, not least in the Apple demimonde, are eager to trans their kids. One literally locked himself in his bedroom when, late in the game, he came down with the Corona-chan. (Achoo!) To paraphrase: While these hacks are presumably Homo sapiens and were made in the image of God, I don’t consider them “human.”
Not only is the NPC meme real, it’s worse: Aristotle was right about certain humans being fit only to be slaves. Modern day trickle down media whores seem to be proof of concept.
Strangest phenomenon I observe now is urban journalist/PR types obsessing about “fitness” and lifestyle optimization. These NPC “professionals” have seem to taken a fancy in such matters. I guess better than being fat hillbillies but whatever. Maybe a hicklib phenomenon. Regime tells you to eat smoothie and jog they do it. Insufferable but I’ll deal with it (you know the type of soulless drone I’m talking about, see tik-tok day in a life)
Separate, I am an applied Econ student in grad school, we do lots of econometrics, but rather than focus on gender inequality studies and “unpaid household labor” I rather focus on commodity markets and geology to make money. I bought your recommendation on Kennedy’s econometrics textbook and the Japanese guy, and found them extremely useful. Any recs focused strictly on financial econometrics for grad level study? I would greatly your input on a solid textbook for modeling . I am aware of GARCH/ARCH but want to go deeper and cut though BS.
glad I stumbled upon your writing Scott
Lots of people are wannabe hustlers and listen to Huberdude and Tim Ferris. It’s not the worst thing: you should keep fit, but Vince Gironda is better reference than any of these poufs. It’s funny they think CEO types are self optimizers: all the ones I’ve ever met are pretty much like normal people, they’re just more competent.
The classics are William Greene’s books and Wooldridge, but I only look at PDFs -Hayashi is supreme and I own the paper one. Another one I look at sometimes is Applied Regression (Draper and Smith, 2nd edition; 3rd is not as good). Taylor’s Modeling Financial Time Series is OK, kind of dated but gets you started and has solid insights. Commods are thinking about a lot of applied facts: Teweles “Futures Game” and the CBOT manual (no econometric content I remember). There ain’t any lemonaide stand books written by traders showing the latest models. Things that purport to do so are almost always bullshit (I don’t like Ruey Tsay’s book for example). New crap comes out all the time and gets deployed without it going into books: you can only learn talking to practitioners. For example I didn’t know about SSVI until a few weeks ago, though I knew Gatherall was important dude.
The major daily newspapers–especially the NYT–have, at least since the 1970s, had reporters looking at the titles to peer reviewed papers and then writing an article about them.
The only thing that has changed is that “Boomers” are starting to realize that they aren’t *actually* immortal, and Xers (I are one) are realizing that the Boomers are going to suck up all the resources, so we are, still, yet again, going to have to be foraging in their rubble to take care of ourselves.
I forgot about Fowler. I first heard of her through her physics booklist being posted in the usual places to the usual credulous response (another key component of the tech journalism human centipede). Not knowing better at the time I wondered why no one else was questioning what she’d done to demonstrate what she learned or how any of it was supposed to help you actually do physics.
Man you seem really mad about this. For the record, “lead” has been a common spelling in the profession for more than a century. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/
Ya man that’s why someone in 2019 had to write a “definitive” blerg on this. Get a job you bum.
At least learn how the world works if you can’t own up to not being able to spell.
There’s alot that could be unpacked here. At least in the sciences and, by extension, tech reporting, I trace to issue to the pop-sci fad that started around 1980. Brief History of Time is probably a progenitor of Quanta (irrespective of Simons), a clear and incestuous bloodline of noodle theorizing and its over-allocation at top schools – Quanta and its ilk are inextricably linked to a menage a beaucoup with the corporate world, which oddly mirrors the academic world’s corporate culture. Media in general has a rich history in agitprop and mind control by governments, and there’s really no line today between government and corporate interests (the oligarchy), so the playbook, whether intentional or emergent, seems natural. It only makes sense that these puppets fall in line. I’ve personally been scripted by media/PR people when having discussions with journalists for attribution only to have them jump in and say “that’s on background, ok?” when I go off script. Because they are the experts? It’s a well-oiled corporate machine.
That being said, there is a nostalgia for a golden age of journalism that strikes me like the heyday of archaeology. They both pre-date me but it’s exciting to think about blazing through pre-Columbian Amerindia jungles or reporting on Pol Pot from an embattled French embassy. Having never lived in the PNW or been a sports fan in the seventies I’ve enjoyed reading the old sports beats in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. They were scrappy, erudite, and incisive writers. The journalists at the old Village Voice, started by Mailer, the torch carried by Pound and others, were first rate. Until they weren’t. I cancelled my WSJ years ago. Before that the NYT, which I used to read cover-to-cover on Sundays. Same with the Atlantic, the New Yorker, N+1, Guardian, and the FT. Many of these are justifiably regarded as left-leaning shill rags today. Not at all my usual leaning I was also known to read Dissent from time-to-time. It’s all gone to shit. I used to like NPR which, at one time, I don’t recall being an orifice for the mentally ill. To quote Maher recently, it’s now being led by a woman who is more a Portlandia character than a CEO. Gender and race, rinse repeat. Even the science rags can’t stop reporting editorial nonsense on race and gender (and general grievances) masquerading as news. So the broader backdrop of journalism, imo, has gone to shit. There was a time when it was great, imo. Marrying this sad fact with the corporate PR machine that pulls the strings of science and tech writers only seems to institutionalize and justify their behaviors in their own minds.
Journalism is toast in part because google killed it 20 years ago, in part because it’s become a high status profession among low IQ non-lede respecters since the spooks laundered Woodward into the establishment. I don’t even care if it’s left wing: some left wing writers are good, and Tim Lede above used to work for Cato: it’s not even that it is a pack of lies (though it is annoying that it is): it’s just that it sucks. It’s like our gay rainbow lizard overlords decided reddit man will believe in anything and he outnumbers conscious people, so why not just phone it in.
I can’t be too hard on Tim. I appreciate that he invented the internet and think he can use it to write whatever leads he wants.
Hey look at the bright side, in clown world we know about Kennedy’s parasitic brain worm.
Off-topic but because you to mock the technology charlatans, what do you make of the late Vernor Vinge’s failed 1993 prediction of a “technological singularity,” along with the recent demise of Nick Bostrom grift, the Future of Humanity Institute?
Those things were always silly.
Vinge is a classic example of a good sci-fi writer who started taking himself too seriously – see also Greg Benford, John Scalzi, Ursula LeGuin. And yes, uploading human consciousness to a computer is going to be pretty difficult when we have no idea how the brain works…