The downfall of tech news?
Lately I’ve been looking for things to talk about for my blog, but I hadn’t found any clever articles or big news events to say anything about. Fortunately, today I finally found an interesting topic: Marco Arment talking about the downfall of tech news.
Over the last few years, I have unsubscribed from nearly every tech-news feed. I have never regretted the decision afterward, and I haven’t missed anything important.
Tech news needs help. Badly. It’s truly terrible.
It isn’t just tech news that sucks lately. News in general sucks lately. If I try to watch CNN and endure the relentless sensationalism and dumbing-down of their news articles (hey, a water-skiing squirrel!), my brain starts to hurt. I don’t even bother watching Fox News or MSNBC - if you think you can get a clear picture of reality by watching blatantly biased news, you’re blatantly biased yourself.
Network news is still OK - local news is corrupted by airing ghostwritten articles promoting some wonder-product, but national news programs still try to be professional and neutral (in the evening), which isn’t bad at all. That said, if you only watch news in the morning, be warned that your vision of reality will be skewed to no end.
The same is true of tech news. Sure, CNN and PCWorld will say whatever wins them pageviews (NYTimes will post similarly useless articles, but that’s usually more out of ignorance than greed), but there are still sites out there that are professional and don’t discriminate. Ars Technica is a great example - yes, you need higher than an 8th-grade reading level to understand it all (significantly higher than that for the scientific stuff), but the exhaustive and nearly infallible analysis is worth it. Very rarely do they post anything frivolous for the purpose of getting pageviews.
The real sad thing is that nobody really demands good news, because nobody really cares. If you asked your friends what the latest problem was with the nuclear negotiations with Iran, and you didn’t give them time to Google the answer, how many of them would give you a useful response? Maybe you have a group of tech-savvy friends that know Intel got sued yesterday by the FTC, but how many read a real, informative news article, and how many went on the blogs and saw a picture of Intel Godzilla?
At least be thankful for this: despite a lot of incompetence and boloney, the tech news world isn’t full of liars and manipulators too. The world of political news has all four of those, and in generous quantities. There’s a reason I don’t post political things on this blog: I’m only willing to make informed statements based on the truth, something that can’t be proven in politics.
