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Chasing Federal Government IT Stories the Old-Fashioned Way (Video)
Wayne Rash is a crusty old IT reporter who lives near Washington D.C. and covers a lot of Federal Government actions, especially those that have to do with technology, for several well-known publications. He did a lot of the original coverage of both the LightSquared debacle and AT&T's attempt to buy T-Mobile. Note the word "original" in there. An awful lot of today's online "news" stories quote other stories. Wayne is totally not a fan of that kind of "reporting," as you'll learn toward the end of this video. What he *does* respect is the old-fashioned way of gathering information: lots of research and digging.
*Real* technology reporting involves aggregating a story that's based on another story that's based on a blog-post that's based on a press release from a company or interest group.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
when we chased IT stories with compressed inline flash video edited audio-corrected and downsampled to a modern web format and streamed over the internet with social media tagging and microblog comments.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Around we make sure to only link to a blog post linking to a news article that's "that kind of 'reporting'", with at least another one or two layers of repeating for good measure.
It's a shame what happened to this once fine profession.
Now it's a bunch of window lickers who learn to shoot from the hip for the quickest public (exclusives sell), not check facts and rely on rumors, and mutiliate the English language. I call this twitch journalism.
Unfortunately the blogosphere took over (quick instant information anyone can publish) and I get to see which drug Lindsay Lohan overdosed on today and which brand of shoes are hot fashion. While the increased speed of information propagation is inevitable because of communication technology mixing the two generations together has lead to unfortunate results. Here we are now with old media attempting to take concepts from a radically different form of communication and incorporate it in their dying business model. It's not working too good.
Bonus - I didn't proofread any of this so this wouldn't get buried in the seemingly endless amount comments this link going to attract so I can get read. I hate this planet.
I'd like a download link at least, please. Considering the amount of people that visits /., there's probably 1000s of us who can't view the vids here....
Following up on the story about the app store simulated as artificial life, it'd be interesting to examine optimal strategies in other topics, such as news reporting. This man seems to be following the "innovate" strategy, while a lot of our news sources are "CopyCat" stratgey. Seems to work out better for the CopyCats... but I do wonder where the balance is before there's not enough original content.
The news is a commodity, the associated press and Reuters have made it so, even if by accident. There are only two ways for a news source to avoid being a commodity:
User experience: Can I browse your news source and have a better experience that another site? Does you website annoy me with interactive ads, does it have a good layout etc?
Original material: Can I get original high quality material from your news source that I can't get elsewhere? Look at the Wall Street Journal, lots of original content, and lots of high quality content.
These are the only two factors that will influence whether any given news source will thrive or whether away. Newspapers that have survived over a hundred years have folded because they could not address these two points acceptably. Meanwhile other news sources that were once considered dinosaurs (Wall Street Journal) are thriving because they /have/ addressed these two issues.
Everything else is moot, politics (left wing, right wing etc), name, location, they are all nothing more than that which get's your foot in the door. If someone is a political news junkie and can't get the content and experience they want from one news source, they will go where they can (CNN was once considered the gold standard and now Fox beats them). Different political views don't change a thing, Newsweek, once a bastion of the liberal side was recently sold for a dollar as those that could not get the content and experience simply switched to different channels (meanwhile the Huffington Post which addressed the very two things I listed is thriving).
Title: Chasing Federal Government IT Stories
Description: Wayne Rash is a crusty old IT reporter who covers a lot of Federal Government actions, especially those that have to do with technology, for several well-known publications. How does he do it?
00:00) <TITLE>
SlashdotTV logo bar reading "Wayne Rash is a senior tech reporter for eWeek and other well-known publications" appears over a view of the interviewee, Wayne Rash, sitting in a room cluttered with materials, with the picture fading from a grey scale still to a colored version.
00:05) <TITLE>
A title appears superimposed over the image, reading "We asked Wayne: How do you find government-oriented IT stories? Specifically, what about Lightsquared vs all the GPS users in the world?"
00:05) Wayne>
Well you get on a story like that to begin with by paying attention to what's going on in the FCC and in Congress - in other words: usually when a company decides to do something like what Lightsquared did, they send out a press release saying they're going to do it, or they somehow or other give information on it.
In this particular case, the first piece of information I got was the announcement from the FCC that this was going to be on the docket.
00:36) Wayne>
I'm on the press list.
Anytime something happens, they send out a press release.
In many cases just a paragraph long, but it tells you something happened.
Then you've gotta go to the FCC's website and look for the filings, which can be an arcane practice in itself because they don't always make it easy to find.
00:55) Wayne>
Yeah, it's good old-fashioned reporting.
You have to know how to look and you have to know where to look.
That's basically what I did; I went and looked for the initial history on the Lightsquared thing - which actually goes back several years.
Then on the fact that the chairman was considering the request to be approved before the testing was done, I looked at everything they had there, and I looked at what Lightsquared said they were doing on their own website, to see what they said it was gonna be doing, as well.
That's how I began to put the story together.
01:29) Wayne>
In the case of something like Lightsquared, pretty much all of the documents are going to be public documents in one form or another, because.. before the FCC.
While some details will be redacted - in this case: when they started doing the testing, the particular brands and types of GPS units were redacted, but the nature of the tests was not - and as a result you look through the public documents.
But you also have to have a pretty good Rolodex so you know who to call, and who to ask about exactly what's going on there.
This was made a little easier in this case because because there were some advocacy groups who wanted to make sure I knew about them, but it's like everything else: you can't trust the advocacy groups to tell you anything except what their position is; they're not necessarily going to give you a true picture of what the other side of the story is about.
02:24) Wayne>
I've been doing this for about 20 years, I would say.
Ever since I've been in D.C. and been doing journalism, I.. it's not so much what I would call investigative work as much I call it really, detail level reporting.
02:40) Robin>
How did you get into it?
02:42) Wayne>
I've been a journalist since I was in my teens.
I've written for publications since then.
I started writing about technology when technology started, showed up.
Computers were not around when I was starting my journalism career.
I was writing about city council meetings and police investigations and raids by the revenuers on evil stills in the mountains.
There was a long time before I started having technology to write about.
03:15) Robin>
That's an interesting question;
Since it's SO easy to get a free phoneline online (Skype, etc.) it's clear that the phone communications are going to become more like email in the future (essentially untrustworthy). It's time to consider building more anonymity into the system for users who want it.