Slashdot Mirror
The Failure of Tech Journalism
Belzebutt writes: "This is a great article that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores. It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorably." Eh, we'll get over it. It's a good rant, something to consider as news sites fold left and right.
--I assume full responsibility for my actions, except the ones that are someone else's fault.
s/Tech Journalism/Business Journalism/g
that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores.
Of course. Well, tech journalists are usually going to write for tech periodicals, which sell advertising to tech firms. Predictably, that makes them about as impartial as Car and Driver magazine.
So, the bigger point is this: which do I, as an informed and newsreading consumer, trust? Slashdot, which is an arm of VA Linux, or MSNBC?
Hmmm...
It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorablyHe does hit home on an irritating issue. Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be. This is a subtle evolution of the "luser who uses Windoze" quote from the NetSlaves author. It's rare that Microsoft does something right, of course, but when it does, it's nice to be able to discuss it rationally. Meta-Moderation should address that, but as long as human beings are involved, impartiality will be unattainable.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Steve Gilliard, who wrote the Netslaves article, is a good friend of mine. For some reason he has trouble getting Linux going.
:)
For me it's exactly the opposite. I'm not smart enough to use Windows, so I stick with Linux.
- Robin
PS- PRIVATE MESSAGE TO STEVE G -- you got linked to from Slashdot, and I didn't have a thing to do with it. Are you happy now?
And hell, why not? If I was trying to sell a product I'd buy me a few reviewers.. By the way, if the Honda Corp is listening- Send me some cash and I'll change that to a positive review..
air and light and time and space
A linux company OWNS you.
You don't post squat about anything BUT linuxInternet Explorer 6.0 is released - no news
Mozilla .9.2.1.0.2.3.6.3.23843 build 29343 gets released and its front page!
If thinkgeek sells it, you think its cool
If amazon sells it, its corporate america after you!
:)
I could go on and on...
Ofcourse you aren't biased, you're just ignorant
BUT, that's what Slashdot, THE COMMUNITY, has decided to be. Those AREN'T journalists. It's not CmdrTaco who's coming down and flaming people. There even exists many legitimate criticisms of Slashdot and Slashdot's journalism. But this guy, in confusing the whole issue, just comes off as stupid.
If you're going to say Slashdot is harsh, say it in an article about the environment of weblog.
If you're going to say journalism is bad, get on them for the all the times they've been had by hoaxes and post press releases for companies submitted by people with the same username as the company.
But if you're going to criticize /., at least do it fairly and in the right forum. Otherwise, you come off seeming like an idiot who doesn't understand what, exactly, he's writing about or what his subject is.
I was photo editor at my college paper (dailly collegian!) So I hung out with many journalists. They make very little money so how can you expect someone who is knowledgable about computers to choose a career in journalism as opposed to a lucrative computer job.
/usenet is a usefull place to get computer information from people actually working and the web is so bad about reporting facts properly.
Thats why slashdot
for example, take a look at Media Whores Online
As they describe themselves: "The site that set out to bring the media to their knees - but found they were already there"
They stomp on everyone's toes.
good stuff
-
- - -
Radio Free Nation
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Funny, I've never thought of Slashdot as "journalism". Who are the reporters? Where are the stories they write? Where is the pretense of objectivity?
Every ed will say straight out they have a pro-linux bias, there's no attempt to disguise it. The anti-MS atmosphere isn't "Slashdot's dirty secret" as mod-losers like to claim, it's just part of the deal. Slashdot is a conversation, not a newspaper. I don't see why people criticize it for not being something it has never pretended to be.
Kill, Tux, kill!
I dare say that most Internet new sites (mainstream ones anyway, ZD/CNet, InfoWorld, etc.) look like corporate whores because they get their news from wire services that are corporate whores. Reuters, Bloomberg, Associated Press, and Dow Jones Newswire. Now those are a bunch of independent thinking and incorruptable companies, eh?
I also dare say that most of the bankrupt news sites wouldn't be in so much trouble if they actually wrote their own news instead of using the same wire stories all their competitors use. Go to Yahoo News, Netscape News, MSN, ZDNet, and PCWeek. Reuters feeds on every one of them, often the same stories. And some sites just use the same reports with a few words changed around so they don't have to credit the original source (or pay for the story - or admit they don't have any competent writers on staff.)
Creative, independent, and different-thinking companies don't always survive - but at least people will care if they don't. I couldn't care less if some Reuters rehash "news" site goes under because I probably don't go to that site anyway. But on the other hand I would probably get teary if The Register, Aint It Cool, Tom's Hardware, Mac OS Rumors, BetaNews, or TheStandard.com (what remains of it) went away because they at least have the guts to be different.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
The number one reason technology is so badly covered starts with the technologists.
1. We have a tendency to assume that all tech media people are stupid or biased, so we give them "shorthand" and "for dummies" explanations that we wouldn't give to anyone we respected.
2. We allows the marketing droids and PR flacks to develop relationships with journalists, when we should be the ones extending ourselves to the industry media.
3. We don't like to contradict our managment when our management say "XYZ" and we know its pure bullshit. So we end supporting OUR corporation's position when we know its not true.
YES, there are plenty of hacks in tech media. But, as i have had a chance to meet and speak with some of the best regarded tech journalists. In my experiences with them, having been sourced a number of times and having contributed to a couple of biggish "scoops", there are also plenty who want to get the story right. But, if the only interface they have is the marketing dept or some project manager with his stock options on the line, they ain't ever gonna hear a discouraging word.
You can't accuse journalists like Dan Gillmor, Mary Jo Foley, Scott Petersen, Walter Mossberg, Peter Coffee, Dan Coursey, Michael Vizard, Jesse Berst, et al of excessive slanting. All of these journalists and the "analysts" like Dvorak have spent many years poking holes in tech corporations "walls of silence"...
Organizations are another thing.
It seems very clear to me, IMHO, that before the purchase of ZDNet by CNET, ZDNet was pretty tough on MS, and this was despite the fact that MS was a HUGE ADVERTISER on ZDNet!
CNET, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be "softer" on its MS coverage than just about any other tech news hub.
Interestingly, since CNET's acquisition of ZDNet, it seems as though some major ZDNet anti-MS reporters such as Mary Jo Foley have gone away, and the overall tone of ZDNet on the subject of MS has softened considerably.
CNET also does not, and never has, seemed as Linux friendly as ZDNet, and I don't get the feeling that CNET wants to do anything to piss MS off.
I'd say it's "Caveat Emptor", i look at the byline. If i know/respect the journalist, i'll read it.
If it's some bozo who can't a monitor from "The Monitor", i'll skip it.
But, if we want more accurate coverage...We are going to have to start by avoiding trolling and flaming journalists who get it wrong, and start developing relationships with the ones who we know cover us fairly and accurately.
And we are going to have to go around our employers sometimes to do that, takes guts and involvement.
without those efforts on our part, you can expect that tech media coverage will remain driven by "Advertiser is King" coverage, until we change it.
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Bashes ./ as biased (well, DUH! we are here because of Linux), but you can hear the crickets chirp as to their mention of Ziff-Davis sites.
ZD is by FAR the most biased, most useless source of tech information. I dumped my subscription to Computer Gaming World after 12 years when they bought it.
In a ZD article, you "coincidently" see and ad for a product around a positive review of it.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I mean, look what happens when a Howard Stern fan calls in during the OJ situation...you have this guy sounding as hickish as he possibly can, and making comments that don't make any sense, and Peter Jennings eats it up. 99% of the people on television are toast without a teleprompter.
For that matter, here's another pet peeve...how come the media always asks actors what their political views are. Why do the opinions of a guy who never has a thought in his mind, a guy who's job is to do and act and feel and say what someone else tells him to, why do they ask him?
All media is propaganda.
"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom. Keep that in mind at all times." Bill Hicks
Reminds me of anands review of the MSI kt7 pro2a, first it was praised as a stable unwavering titan winning the kt7 shootout last november-ish. Anand then converted a couple of servers only to find out that the product was severely flawed randomly rebooting for no apparent reason. This prompted him to basically flame MSI for their bad support, while simultaniously running nice big MSI advertisements all over the front page.
No I don't endorse your product, but I'll happily accept your money for ad space. Now this is one event and I don't visit as much as I used to (back when anands was still somewhat navigable) but it was a striking conflict of interest. How can you review hardware given to you for free (presumably) while also advertising the very same product or those of possible competitors who may choose not to advertise. In any case I still think for the most part Anand's does a pretty good job all things considered, I can live with the ad's though I'm always thinking "wonder if they get any kickback or payola for this?" Oh well...
The article implies that until recently, journalists were ethical. How about George Will, who loves to pontificate about ethics on ABC's "This Week" program? Remember how badly he wanted Ronald Reagan to do well in a pre-election presidential debate? He coached Mr. Reagan secretly beforehand even though Mr. Will was going to serve as one of the debate's questioners! And this guy is still allowed to practice journalism and editorialize (about ethics, among other things).
Whoring journalists are nothing new. Being online just gives them better opportunities to pimp themselves.
Eh, we'll get over it.
That's the most disinterested, apathetic attitude I've seen in a long time. Get over it? Is that how you respond to valid criticisms?
Three years ago, Slashdot was "The Place" to go for computer news. Slashdot broke stories way before any other sites covered them. The message boards were lit up with intelligent conversation and discussion.
Today? Some articles are duplicated twice, even three times. Slashdot lags behind other news sites in stories, the postings are heavy on opinion instead of fact, and the site has a tremendous bias. Stories are submitted days, sometimes weeks in advance, and are rejected only to be posted much later by someone else's submission. Articles are posted without so much as a second thought to grammar and spelling.
What did you expect? Congratulations?
Obviously, a lot less care is being taken to make Slashdot the place it used to be.
And you'll just....eh....get over it? Instead of sulking in the corner and trying to "get over it", why not attempt to CHANGE the negative aspects that make people say "You suck!" Start listening to the valid complaints and criticisms people send you, and take action. Consider suggestions. Be a little proactive. Sure, code updates are good, but people DO care a lot about CONTENT as well.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
and it never claimed to be. it's a news weblog with reader comments... unless you call this, what I am doing now, journalism. bullshit. this corrected point of view reveals his entire rant on slashdot to be a load of steaming sensationalism. mention slashdot, especially in a negative way and it's instant traffic, just like the marketing department ordered.
Much of the moderation here appears to be done based on whether or not the moderator personally agrees with you, regardless of how intelligent or relevent your comments may be.
:)
I don't know how true this really is. I usually browse at +2, and slashdot is reasonably nice to read. And I see a moderate (heh) amount of slashdot/editor/moderator/linux bashing. Since unpopular opinions *do* get through the moderation process, I figured all was right in the world. But recently, I decided to see for myself how "censored" slashdot comments really are. I spend a week browsing at -1, flat.
It was nightmare.
Barely intelligible racial and sexual slurs. ASCII art (what is this? An 1980s bbs?) Offtopic rants about censorship that were modded <gasp> offtopic! Porn, violence, profanity, ad nauseum. One could list for days the horrors that go on (and on) in AC land. I won't bore anyone with the details. (But don't take my word for it, it's there for anyone with the courage to see.)
Sure, there was the occasion funny or insightful post that was labeled incorrectly by humourless or thick-headed moderators, but they were few. Nothing seemed to have been unjustly downgraded.
So thank you, unsung slashdot moderators. As much as the editors, story submitters, and insightful comment makers, *you* make slashdot a place worth visiting. Without your tireless efforts, I would have given up on this site full of teenage potty-mouths months ago. Keep up the good work!
Now I am returning to the relative safety of +2, threaded.
The same can be said of scientific journalism. Most science journalists are science whores. If they were doing their jobs, they would uncover that a lot of what passes itself as science, especially in the physics community, is really a bunch of chicken feather voodoo. A few things that come to mind are time travel, wormholes, multiple parallel universes, quantum computing (yes, a big fucking hoax that one is), time warps, dimensions that have sizes, dimensions that can be curled up into little tiny little balls, etc., etc...
It's truly fucking pathetic. Worst of all, most of the proponents of all this Star-Trek hocus pocus are big-time famous physicists like Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, David Deutsch, and the like, hiding behind a wall of obfuscations and thinking they are forever beyond public scrutiny. And all of it is supported by the public's money. Science journalists are ready to prostitute themselves to interview those charlatans. And they do.
So don't lay all the blame for what's wrong with journalism on tech journalists. It's all over the place. It's called bias and self-interest. As Feyarabend wrote, "it is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action."
Freedom of information = open source = open science. We, the public, don't need a condescending priesthood to look down on us while spending our money.
This is my rant. I've said what I had to say. You can mod me down now.
It seems to me that while OSDN brings in revenue, there is an unexplored opportunity for another branch to fill exactly the niche that the article is discussing. VA Linux is no longer in the hardware business. That makes them a completely neutral player relative to that business. And they have all that knowledgable talent.
I might be wrong but I doubt that people who were originally drawn to Linux were interested in corporate hype. Isn't this supposed to be a distinguished feature of the movement? And coming off of the 10 year anniversary, Linux doesn't need the evangelism anymore. Heck, the corporations such as IBM and HP will do all the evangelism required.
There is a natural niche for older knowledgable players in any industry, and that's to be lovable curmudgeons. They've already made their mark. They have good reputations. In other words, they're naturals for the type of journalists the article calls for.
Furthermore in order for VA Linux to succeed in their SourceForge endeavor, they have to find a way to reach people outside of the current Slashdot box. Slashdot doesn't complement VA Linux at all when it comes to the image the company needs to sell to people outside the community. As Eric Raymond wrote, the company's survival depends on selling products to people different from Slashdot's audience.
Linux will survive but VA Linux won't unless they do something drastically different from what their competitors offer. VA Linux is selling a product that in essence says that things are broken in current industry. But pure Linux advocacy is incapable of reaching the people that VA Linux needs to reach to make the sale. The message needs to be communicated in a different way, and the article shows a way to try this.
Hmm... Are you calling Robert X. Cringely, who uses the PBS web site paid for by my tax dollars to promote a Canadian company for which he sits on the board of directors and is paid to promote the company is a "corporate whore"??? Say it isn't so!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
I'm a journalist working for IDGNet in New Zealand. We IT writers do come in for a lot of crap because of our seemingly loose ethical standards. We accept vendor-paid trips to conferences and events, lunches to "discuss" important issues (like desert), toys to "review" often on long-term basis and so on. Business reporters have a duty to report the truth in an unbiased manner and they often list their investments/involvements with the companies they write about. It IT we tend to miss out that step and not reveal our prejudices and that's wrong. But at the same time I know a lot of reporters who are very principled - more so than some of the plonkers we interview and write about. We dig the dirt out as and where we can - I remember being told it's a journalist's duty to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Don't know if it's true but we are required to be skeptical about as much as we possibly can, to view it from that other angle to see if what we're being told (and sold) stacks up... It's not as simple as reading the press release and calling the people listed and asking them to repeat what they've already said - leave that to TV thanks... online journalism has a long way to go before people will trust it implicitly but then so does newspaper, radio and TV journalism. I think we virtual reporters have the best job in the world - I get paid to play with things and keep up to date on something I care about.. it's fantastic. But there are dangers out there and this rant does point them out quite nicely.
Be skeptical - it's all that stands between us and the PR crap.
I am a leaf on the wind
Not just the CBC. CTV also had a pretty fun time with Stockwell's problems. On the whole, I'll trust CTV a bit more ( certainly not completely :) ) than the CBC with political stuff.
I've always had great respect for a few tech journals - Sun Expert (now S/W Expert) has always had excellent articles that seemed relevant to issues we were looking at at the time - maybe because the articles were written by regular users (sys admins, people who did software development for a living) rather than "journalists". "Software Development" seems to have similar integrity. But I guess that's not what this guy was ranting about...
Energy: time to change the picture.
You need to read Tom's Hardware or Sharky Extreme. Even PC Computing (best for long flights, bird cages and darts). Tom's and Sharky's does the kind of detailed, intensive reporting that most magazines avoid.
Quite true. His article makes alot of sense, now if he had only included
The Register he would have rounded it out nicely. I can see that some posts are trying to take to task his portrayal of Slashdot as a Linux-Centric site. Come on. We all KNOW that this site is devoted to Linux Advocacy before tech journalism. There is nothing wrong with that. The main problem seems to be the rabid "knee jerk" reactions shown by the community in general here. (You only need to look at any story do do with Microsoft, and then read the comments therein.)
The authors comments towards the PC Mag Review are bang on. ZD net has always had a positive bias toward Microsoft products just as (as the author mentions) Macaddict has favorable review of Macs. Not much of a surprise there. The reason that ZD is still around is that it is very business oriented, and it's reader base is very much entrenched in the Microsoft world.
Maybe the net public realized this bias (or, perhaps I should say "lack of news") before the author did though. Myself and my friends frequently visit tech sites that are indepentant. In fact, in the list of independant sites we regularly visit we have noticed no layoffs of staff, or any change in the way they run their websites. If we the readers ignore the biased sites (and thus ignore the advertising) the site (which cannot now make any money sitting in their Aeron chairs) then the website dies.
I have not noticed that many of the "dotcoms" are dissapearing. This is probably because I realized long ago what was a good website, and what was not. I think most of us have.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
ohhh of course that excludes putting a desktop PC on almost every home users desk in the world right ? (if it wasn't for MS-Dos, their would be no PC-as-we-know-it)
Indeed. In fact, your quote of my original posting included the assertion that Microsoft has indeed has some practical uses.
And I will give Microsoft credit where it's due. Microsoft can be at least partially credited for standardizing the Intel x86 architecture, for one thing. IBM may have created it, but it was the clone makers selling it to run MS-DOS that standardized it. For sure, it was a dated kludge of an architecture even when it was introduced in 1981, but the fact that we don't have 18 different popular desktop platforms has terrifically simplified buying a computer. The adoption rate has been increased greatly as a result of Microsoft selling MS-DOS.
On the other hand, Microsoft did not invent Plug and Play. The Amiga had it in 1985, the Mac in 1984 and the TI-99/4 in 1979. They merely managed to make it work (sorta) on the Intel platform that IBM designed and they standardized.
Microsoft did not invent the Internet, did not invent TCP/IP, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, e-mail, etc. Hell, they didn't even invent MS-DOS.
So, what does Microsoft do well? Sell their products and implement standards. Not good standards, usually.
Like VHS winning over Beta, Microsoft usually pushes the technically inferior standard, of its own or someone else's creation. Just on sheer volume. And again, like VHS winning over Beta, a default operating system and platform sure makes it a lot easier to use your computer.
Anyone else here old enough to remember trying to mount DOS diskettes on an Amiga, or Amiga diskettes on a Mac, or Mac diskettes on a TI-99/4A? That's the only part of Microsoft which has been a blessing to the industry.
As with most other people who've got experience with more than one operating system (and, better still, several hardware and CPU platforms), I've seen enough variety of computers to know that Emperor Bill has no clothes.
VHS versus Beta? Beta's still very much alive, thank you. Consumers don't know quality, but TV stations sure do.
small minded ignorant linux smux, gotta love emI've yet to meet anyone with any degree of experience in multiple operating systems who still feels positively about Microsoft. If all you've ever driven is Hyundais, I guess it's pretty hard to understand how someone could like a Plymouth Superbird or a Porsche 959.
And, lemme tell you, Windows 2000 makes a nice daily driver. Disposable, just like a shiny new Hyundai Sonata.
Favorite linux user quote of the decade : "I can't get my modem working" hahahahahahahahahahahaha......True. It's so much better to have similarly incompetent people actually managing to get online, contract every dread e-mail virus known to man, and then continue to pollute *my* webserver (paid for with *my* money) through *their* idiocy, right?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Slashdot readers aren't Linux whores; they're more like Linux groupies.
Yeah.. they both like to screw, but one of them gives it away for free!
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
From the article:
So the failure of the Mexican project is as surprising as college kids having unprotected sex in dorm rooms.
Shit! College kids are having unprotected sex in dorm rooms? Where the hell am I when this shit happens... why ain't I part of this group? Ah, fuck it... I'm gonna go recompile the kernel again.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
"Well, if you drop TV dinners over New Guinea, you'll kill people because the food will go bad because they will eat the melted, rotting food long before they getthe microwaves to cook it."
I didn't get it.
If they're eating the food, how is it rotting?
Everything else was pretty smooth, though.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Well DUH, isn't that what this topic is about?
On the other hand, why would slashdot claim to be news for nerds, stuff that matters?
I admin 5 Solaris Boxen, 20+ databases, 2 financial application 11i instances, 1 10.7 instance, and 4-5 custom applications.
I have one linux box that i screw around with. All this news with linux is old news.
So why the headling "news for nerds, stuff that matters"
when
1) a new email program means squat
2) working for someone for a chance to win a prize is a joke
3) mozilla still sucks compared to Opera and IE
4) linux is linux, you can't deny it. We know rob likes it.
5) you already know.
Fact of the matter is there is alot more in "geekdom" and "nerds" then just linux and thinkgeek.
Take the Xfree86 & solaris topic. Every good idea was shot down saying linux already does it. Well that article wasn't about linux doing it, it was about solaris doing it. Xfree86 isn't linux nor is linux xfree86.
just rambling. but it would be nice if slashdot got back to its grass roots. believe me, after a days worth of reading you know this place is biased, but now it is simply a joke.
Pick up any tech publication these days, and you'll see this kind of thing. If you really want to see it, though, you should check out the gaming rags.
GamePro is a good one to check if you want to see the antithesis of reporting. They put out a magazine full of screenshots and one or two paragraph previews and reviews. EGM at least tries for some content. (Even if it is very industry-praising.)
In the PC market, if you want to see some really kiss-ass writing, grab any recent copy of PC Gamer. First, check the advertiser's index, and count the number of reviews for each company. Then check the review scores for said companies. See a correlation?
These online "breaking news" sites aren't much better. Blue's News , for instance, is a good place to go if you want to check out the current state of the gaming industry's PR department. I mean really, how many screenshots and developer's journals do they have to pump out before we finally get the point that oh, hey, they might actually be working on that game.. Anyone remember those Tribes 2 screenshots?
Speaking of screenshots, if I see one more "exclusive," I think I'm gonna puke.
VoodooExtreme 's not much better, but at least they don't have ads all over the place.. and they filter out most of the "we just fixed another bug" crap.
Ah well.. c'est la vie..
His whole point is that this particular sector is unethical in an unprecedented degree. If this guy was a real journalist, he would know that this goes on in all kinds of press, and is nothing new.
If he knew anything at all about journalism, he would know that the watergate expose is the exception, and not the rule.
Most industries have a few myths that are generally accepted as truths. Today Ben Stein posted an interesting article on thestreet.com, dissecting the myth about the high longterm yields of the stock market. He showed that it is a myth. However, 99% of financial reporters and analysts accept this myth as pure truth. Does that make reporters of the financial sector crooked, or cold it just be incompetence, and lack of foresight.
Every single industry has similar problems. Do you see many of the car magazines criticizing the industry, and the government for the SUV scandal?
Does body builder magazines publish critical articles on the dangers, and use of steroids?
When's the last time you saw one of the fashion magazones write that Kalvin Klein makes pretentious dozen ware, and DKNY makes ugly clothes?
When's the last time a D.C. newspaper did a deep and dirty expose on congress, senate or white house, that had anything to do with the politics? Nope, they're too busy to dig up sex stories, leaving the pols to do their business unaudited.
So I have to disagree with the author. Yes, there's a lot of crap in tech journalism, but that's not special. Crap journalism has been a readily available commodity for a long time, all over the place.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
is like going to Bill Clinton for marital counseling and/or babysitting.
is like going to Phillip Morris executives for help to quit smoking.
C'mon people. If the journalists of this web site actually think of themselves as journalists, then I'm fucking George Lucas because I download movies off the net.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
But overall, this was a great article, and I liked realitycheck's comment that ./ is a forum, not journalism, while the guilty parties actually pretend to be journalists, which doesn't make them stupid, although it does make them whores.
Then again, I like vehement opinions delivered accurately and with both eloquence and profanity.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Frankly, I'm surprised that you harsh on ./ editorial staff while ignoring the frequent technical disruptions that plague it. To me, they are both like watching a certain bartender at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge cough in his hand and then use the same hand to haul ice out of a tub into a glass that will shortly hold a drink. It's distasteful and horrible to look at, but if you are a regular, you can sense the goatse and you stick to the bottled beverages.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The dot-com failures were more than a failure of tech journalism. They were a national failure.
Even after the dot-coms failed, the press did not bother to analyze what happened. There was a little analysis, but nothing in depth, either in the tech press or the business press.
The failures were a huge tragic loss of money and time. But the mood was, oh well, on to something else.
Bush's education improvements were
Just because Linux is a free OS does not make journalist advocacy any less unethical. Call them "non-profit whores" if you must. But no one is clean in this business. No one.
Advocacy.
Shilling.
Yeah, most tech-jouralism consists of towing the corporate line in a futile quest for goodies. It fuckin' blows.
You have 'evangelists' who give only one one side of any issue and if the truth gets bent, well, so what? Eh?
AOL buys NetScape at a fire sale and M$'s lawyers declare than the domain is "vibrant and alive." Yeah. With maggots and blow-flies feeding off the corpse of another ex-competitor.
The software field needs a few "Deep Throats" in Redmond, Cupertino and everywhere else you get suck-dick regurgication of press releases. I want to see a Ralph Nader with a huge hard-on bashing these lying cock-suckers in the head with cinder-blocks.
All we get to read are articles of faith written by the uneducated and underpaid to deceive, obfuscate and distort the qualifications of the pageant contestants. "She got great measurements does't she?" Yeah. I'm supposed to LIKE a girl with three tits and multiple rows teeth like a shark's? That blows but she won't... She'd better not ever try.
Tech manuals aren't much better than hard-copy of the man pages. Choke and puke until you feel like a baby bird. You end up with a sour taste in your mouth (not your own) and screw all left in your wallet at $39.95 to fuck knows how much a pop, for some out-dated hunk of dead tree.
Nobody writes how to USE anything because they don't have a clue what any crap is used for or by whom or how or when and certainly not why. They're liberal arts majors and write on Underwood manual typewriters. (I KNOW some okay?)
I'm going to start a wiki on my site dedicated to everything that's WRONG with this shit. I'll flame the shit out of every ass-hole who cobbles some crap together without a clue as to what its for of how its used or why.
They'll hate me. I don't give a crap.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I was just curious to know more about your example of "Car and Driver" magazine not being impartial. I've read C/D for quite a while, and have found that this magazine contains the most fair and unbiased, uninfluenced views in automotive journalism. I don't even know of any publication that I've felt comes close to their level or journalistic integrity. They tend to apologize for false statements in the magazine when written to, and even print extremely criticizing letters from readers in every issue.
As an example, there was a small-car comparo a few months back where they slammed Toyota, one of their largest advertisers, calling their new Echo: "Something entirely new from Toyota: a big mistake."
I just don't see why you would have used C/D as your example, why not Motor Trend, who can't say anything bad about any car, and is roughly equivalent to PC Magazine in this regard.
This is honestly just curiousity, I don't mean to flame, and my apologies to the parents of idiot moderators who will denounce this as offtopic, even though the SUBJECT already says so.
If I was talking about your nephew and cousin I wouldn't have used the term IT Professional. I'm talking about people who read/write in technical forums/news sites. Anyone who reads such is more often than not - is in some computer related field.
The world is not so large when you're talking about online technical "news" sites.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
Having written some articles in a past life for a now defunct technical/multi-media journal, I remember getting in particularly hot water. Something to do with PC MIDI cards, one in particular that was fresh, revolutionary, offered SMPTE, and didn't cut corners like some other companies.
... and my head on a stick.
... then died an unnoticed death.
And though in my review, I was technically correct, and even though I did NOT mention any competitors, UBETCHA, one of these companies, particularly the one which took out several half page ads, demanded from the editors a retraction
Needless to say, the magazine didn't ask me to write any further articles. Needless to say, as other, competent writers were also stifled for telling the truth, that the magazine languished in limbo for almost a year
It was fun to write articles, but I noticed alot of authors in it for the conventions and parties that came along with the press pass. I also began to notice several other editors who sucked up to advertising clients, even when the technology begged otherwise.
I also noticed that many such magazines are short-lived.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Interesting, when I do a Google Search for "Open Source Journalism" and Slashdot I get a few dozen hits. One of which leads to the OSDN Media Kit which describes Slashdot as
Now you can argue whether Slashdot's editorials are actually Open Source or not but to claim that CmdrTaco and crew providing you with news and their opinions on the news isn't journalism is quite frankly, rather incorrect.
Journalism in general is dead.
It was replaced by "entertainment" and "advocacy" a long time asgo.
In an entire 4 year "Journbalism degree" my alma mater had not one section of one course on "Journalism ethics."
Journalism is dead, greed and stupidity killed it. Its enterred a mass grave with such things as "politics" and "community spirit".
So it goes.
Let us isolate some of his specific allegations and see if they are, on balance, true:
Linux skepticism is long overdue, but the missionary ideologues jump on your back and kick you in the balls. The kind of independent tech journalism needed to cover Linux doesn't exist.
If Oracle could run MS into the ground today, they would do it. Taking sides in such a battle is a core betrayal of everything journalism should stand for.
Consumer Reports has the right idea, but they are so stodgy that they are nearly useless to the average consumer.
Take Windows ME. What a piece of crash-daily crap. ME was a horrible OS. It barely worked...
Many dotmags were as ethically challenged as a Mexican policeman.
Now the San Jose Mercury News ... is run by some of the most gutless people ever to call themselves journalists
The reality is that everyone had their heads up their asses because they thought they were going to be rich.
Hell, there would be no Microsoft without the feds investing trillions in technology.
Do these statements sound like neutral and detached coverage that he extolls? Given the hyperbole, are his conclusions likely to be sound?
His point seems to be: The one lesson that all these online rags never got is that if you are a pimp today, when things get shitty, people will turn on you.
What perhaps he should explain is why the market place sometimes punishes the publications he calls unreliable and sometimes it doesn't.
And I can't let this overwrought assertion pass: Journalism is a noble profession when done right. And people get killed doing it every year.
Nobody gets killed writing about technology either truthfully and not. The worst that happens is that they get their backs jumped on or kicked in the balls by Linux zealots, who are a notoriously mean and ornery bunch.
Well the reason that most hardware sites are useless is that their methodology sucks. "Ummm, OK, this got X frames in Quake and a Y score in winbench and the bios has a nice menu and I overclocked it and Windows 98 seemed OK for the 10 minutes I tried it. 5 STARS!!"
The fact that they somewhat accidentally found out the real quality of some product is astounding. God forbid that they would put every motherboard in as a production webserver for a week or so to see how it did. Or plug in a video capture board or 1024MB of RAM or any of the other things which might be useful to someone specing out a box that isn't meant to be this month's disposable game machine.
Another example is the terrible 2D quality of Nvidia cards. These sites are wall-to-wall GeForce reviews, but I've seen maybe two that actually even tagentially made a subjective judgement about the 2D quality. Maybe in their world they play 3D games 90% of the time, but not in mine.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
He brings up some very good points -- and the sort of backhand at Slashdot isn't anything that hasn't been said and nodded at by everyone here, and yeah, I'm sure we'll all get over it. Where he runs into a problem, though, is in his amusing assertion that the "legitimate" media [characterization is mine, not a quote] have and adhere to these standards of ethics. That's laughable. I wish I could find the references now, but I don't remember whether it was in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I read about the publishing policy at the Los Angeles Times a few years ago -- where the publisher overruled the editorial staff and declared that no articles that were antagonistic to the advertisers would be run.
It's true of every news organ that the subscription fees (if any) do not even come close to financing the business. News outlets, whether they're radio, television, print, or online, are not actually in business for the reader. It's the same old story, guys: Follow the Money. The people who are actually making these "news" organs into profitable businesses are the advertisers, and don't think that the editorial and publishing staffs don't know this. They know exactly who their customers are. The customers are the advertisers. And their product is their subscriber base. The way they manufacture their product is to spew forth infotainment designed to keep their product's infamously short attention span focused on the medium long enough to score an ad impression.
The only part of this article that I really disagree with is his holier-than-thou attitude. Yeah right, offline media have ethics. Go watch The Insider and look at how 60 Minutes -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.
If you're in journalism, you're a whore. So what? We're mostly not down on prostitution around here, so long as we get our share. Here's fifty bucks; suck on this.
Oh, go on, check out my job.
If your definition of "maintain" is "moronically install stuff until the hard drive is full, then re-install Windows when I start having problems with the OS" and your definition of maintaining Linux is "hacking the kernel not from source, but with a hex editor" then yeah, Windows is much easier to maintain.
I'm not sure who you're trying to impress...I guess the "smart" people who switched back to Windows when they couldn't get Red Hat to work on their Presarios. Sad for them, sad for you. No, no, don't learn more about Linux and certainly don't help get support for your machines; dump Linux for being "crap" and go with the platform that "r00lz". j00r such l33t d00dZ!
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
When eurodisney was doing crappy a while ago (AFAIK they still are) they spent a lot of advertising money. You know what they did? They bought an entire issue of a German magazine. Nothing to do with high tech, but every article in the magazine was about disney.
Next time you watch the news, and you see something that doesn't really seem like news ask yourself the following questions:
The magazines, all of them, know who their customers are: The advertisers. If you're dealing with a for profit publication that advertises, you can pretty much throw out the notion of integrity.
If you're dealing with a group of people that have a common interest they will certainly be biased.
I dunno, I kinda liked your sig better when it was "Unix users?". Old skool and all.
Heh. You know, actually, that's not what it was meant to say, at all. I changed it mostly because most people were misreading it - there's only so much you can do in a .sig.
"UNIX? They're probably not even circumcised. Savages."
It was getting me flamed. Lots of it was the predictable (and funny!) "I was robbed at birth, don't make fun" stuff. You know, balding 23-year-olds who watch anime and blame their social maladjustment on the absence of a piece of skin. (Sorry if I just described anyone, this wasn't meant to be offensive.)
But the majority of the flames were coming from people who were reading the .sig differently from the way I intended. One day, my e-mail box was full of people calling me names for implying that there was anything better than UNIX. Of course, UNIX and its derivatives (Linux) are without question the best general purpose operating system for servers and Big Iron.
The old sig was a play on "UNIX" sounding like "eunuchs". Eunuchs, of course, are castrated men.
Note the question mark after UNIX in the original .sig. The question, from the unseen (and unquoted) other speaker could have been any number of things... "Do they know UNIX?", "Can they write a shell script in UNIX?", "Does microsoft.com use UNIX webservers?"...
So, it was more a suggestion of a lack of civility among those who would approve of the [clearing throat with disdain] other operating system which claims to be ready for the big times. You know, the one which evolved from desktop to datacenter as a mish-mash of patched-on features, versus the alternatives which had their origins on robust time-sharing systems.
Unfortunately, while I thought I'd worded it in such a way that everyone would get it (and my test audience of 4 people *did* get it), I discovered the bug. You know, the kind that requires a quick patch. For the longest time, though, I thought the hate messages were from people who consider microsoft.os.windows.advocacy to be a well-informed bunch, or people who were unhappy that they couldn't accumulate smegma. The first message I got from someone literate enough to actually describe his contempt, I changed the .sig and explained what I'd been meaning.
When the Code Red bug came along, it seemed like a great opportunity to plug my website. Nothing quite so controversial there, I merely added the "IIS Users?" link to it, and there it is.
(Oh boy, am I gonna take a karma hit for what's coming...)
Finally, a more personal explanation, lest you find the latter half of my .sig to be offensive. I went to a drunken kegger party with a bunch of U of M engineering students in Ann Arbor MI. As the token Canadian, I was expected to bring a good Canadian beer - "You know, Lawrence, not the formulaic Molson and Labatt stuff!". I brought a 24 of a beer whose translated French name means "The Damned". It's a little strong, so it wasn't very popular with anyone but me. 18 of them later, and my ?third? ?fourth? bathroom break of the evening, it happened.
To paraphrase the line from There's Something About Mary, I managed to get the beans above the frank.
Nothing sobers you up faster than that. Legend has it that the scream could be heard as far away as State Street.
A stumble from the dorms to the hospital ensued, and though the doctor was able to extricate the tissue from the zipper on my Levis, it was totalled. As totalled as a Honda Civic at a monster truck show. As shredded as a garbage bag caught in a snowblower. Fortunately, the contents were unscathed, a circumcision was performed, and my only regret is that I didn't have that accident sooner.
So, as one of the few who has actually had sex both with and without a foreskin, I can assure you that all you miss out on is having a dick which looks like the business end of an anteater. Sex is actually better *after* than before, which basically erases all rational arguments against the procedure. I'm quite a proponent now (privacy and advocacy seldom go hand in hand). And each of the five years since, I've sent a Hannukah card to the good Doc who did it.
If you want more details on before and after sexual and daily living comparisons to sate any questions, e-mail me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Take a look at this. It claims to be a "Report" but is obviously whoring for va-linux, who happens to own Newsforge.
Initially it tries to be critical but towards the end we get this wonderful commercial for sourceforge.
Yesterday in the Dutch newspaper 'NRC Handelsblad' (about the IBM-linux deal with NYSE): "The Finnish company Linux..."
:)
I mean... if you don't have a clue as a reporter, stay away from the keyboard... please..
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
"Most tech journalists are corporate whores!"
This is news? Jesus, I knew this back in the days of "Compute!," back when they still published BASIC programs on paper. Bias towards one's advertisers is nothing new. Hell, this isn't even a restriction on tech journalists, as most mainstream journalists are also corporate whores.
The fact of the matter is that if you piss off the people who buy your advertising, there isn't a very high likelihood that they'll continue to buy the advertising that pays your bills. Using Dan Rather and the white house as an example of this is horrible. Of course the White House never paid Dan Rather's wages. That was done by Charmin.
Basically, all that's happened in this article is that yet another idiot has finally figured out what they should have known from the age of 10 - that the media is a big fucking sham and that none of it is to be believed. Get over it already and take it all with a big lump of salt.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
c't magazine is one of the largest computer magazines in Germany (or maybe the largest? whatever!) and I don't think they are influenced by the advertisements. So it's possible.
OTOH, I do know that it's difficult. We have a heap of badly-done magazines here as well that are heavily biased towards MS. It makes me appreciate c't only more...
It keeps getting worse. Try to find really negative reviews in a current issue. Even sites like AnandTech and Tom's Hardware find more flaws in the reviewed products. The only rants they manage to publish are about competing media, like the one about price comparison websites (afraid of losing some advertising Marks? It's too bad that some other large magazine publishers in Germany already have price comparison websites and heise doesn't ...). I used to buy every issue, but stopped about 2 years ago.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
In the late 1980s and first few years of the 1990s, UNIX was on its way out. There was a feeling of "this was good, but it is looking pretty bad compared to the way windowed home computer OSes, especially the Mac and Amiga, have been developing." Then two things happened: (1) a free UNIX-like OS appeared, and (2) those home computer OSes either disappeared (Amiga) or severely lost focus (Mac, and later Windows 95). "Linux is the greatest OS ever!" was not one of the reasons.
What has happened in the last ten years is that some people have deluded themselves into thinking that Linux is the end-all, be-all of operating systems, and not just UNIX-variant (I realize some purists hate it when Linux is compared to UNIX, but let's be realistic about it). This does not mean that Linux is bad. It simply means that Linux should not be immune to criticism, and criticism should not be met with a wall of defensiveness. Heck, there's some good open source software out there, and there's also quite a bit from angry college students without any software engineering experience. Certainly that latter shouldn't be hailed as brilliant simply because it is free as in speech.
...in journalism (tech or otherwise), despite the current state of affairs.
It's unfortunate this discussion has devolved into a bunch of flames about the least interesting part of this article (the rant on /.) because the question of media whoredom is far more interesting. The most fascinating part of such pimping of advertisers products is that it doesn't serve the advertisers. After the first time a reader buys a lousy product after seeing an ad and a review in a magazine, he will assume all products advertised there are just as worthless.
An excellent recent example can be found in David Coursey's column about Blackcomb, MS's first truly .Net OS release. Coursey explains that Blackcomb will be delayed, suggesting: "[A]s Blackcomb waits, there's talk that Microsoft will add a refresher release of Windows XP (supposedly code-named Longhorn) in the 2003 time frame, as a means of rolling out some new technology before the Blackcomb release."
The ZDNet pimp continues with the warning, "Microsoft should consider this carefully, as its most trouble-prone Windows release came to be in just this manner. Windows Me, it should be remembered, was an interim release brought out after Windows XP was delayed for a year. Win Me seems to have caused at least as many problems as it solved. Perhaps Microsoft will remember this before it updates Windows XP just because it needs a revenue hit while Blackcomb is delayed."
Now go to ZDNet's reviews of Windows ME and try to find anything that let readers know it was the "most trouble-prone Windows release" which "caused at least as many problems as it solved." It just isn't there in the reviews. It seems that ZDNet was only willing to tell this to readers because Windows XP is now out, so its advertiser is now urging users to update from WinME to something else.
It is quite disturbing how often this is the case. When I started my company, I was not in a position to test systems myself so I read the industry press which seemed to be in complete agreement that NT 4.0 was going to finally be a stable network operating system from Microsoft and that Access was an excellent database for small business. I put all my money in a sales program written with Access and came very close to losing it all -- my business, all my money, even my house.
This led me to be suspicious of the tech press on NT, which was fortunate because they didn't admit 4.0 was a dog until 5.0 (or Win 2000, if you prefer) came out actually delivering what the industry press said 4.0 had. We chose Linux for our web server, which worked so well that we are now using Linux as our network OS.
I now get my Windows news from ArsTechnica, although there is a bit of a bias even there.
If you want to understand the reasons for pimping in tech press, compare the journals written for doctors with those written for lawyers. Doctors are used to getting everything for free, including their professional publications. Lawyers are used to paying for everything and passing it along (in "library use" charges) to their clients. The result is that lawyers' journals are highly informative, while doctors' journals (not JAMA or New England Journal of Medicine, but periodicals directed specifically to practicing physicians in various specialties like Cap/Cities Medical News Group) imagine themselves to be captives of the drug companies which buy most of their advertising space.
I say "imagine" because the drug companies are neither well served by nor particularly interested in magazines which deceive doctors in their interest. The editors, who are often corporate whores without the ability to conceive of a drug company which is not just as unethical as they are, just assume they are. A case in point is the reporting on the side effects of early birth-control pills:
The reporters sent to professional gatherings where the side effects were announced by researchers wrote stories for their editors' OB-GYN magazines. The drug companies were not trying to hide these results. Often their researchers were the ones doing the announcing. Often they had come up with alternatives which were safer, which they wanted the subscribers to these magazines to prescribe to their patients. But the editors steadfastly refused to publish the information on the grounds that side effects might scare people from using drug company products.
The long-term result was that more people were harmed by side effects, birth-control pills got a bad name at precisely the time when they had become much more safe. The corrupt editors had actually harmed drug-company profits, even though the companies themselves had never asked for the dishonest coverage.
Now the question should be: How much of the current tech downturn is the result of tech-media pimps failing to serve their advertisers by failing to serve their readers?
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.