Money.<p>Pretty much any sentence of that piece could be spun off into an individual post on techcrunch &c. Spread your insight over a dozen blog-posts, and you get far more ad revenue<p>The New Yorker, on the other hand, gets the very best writers and gives them massive amounts of time to write a very small amount of text. So when you read, say, an article by Seymour Hersh, you know he's spent anywhere up to 6 months working on it.
Analysis reporting (making educated guesses and telling stories) has valuable functions. It "shakes trees" in the sense that sources sometimes come forward to confirm or deny an analysis. It promotes skepticism by providing alternative to controlled press releases and controlled leaks. It also is a dog in the fight to influence the "commonly accepted narrative" of events - the interpretations about the uncertain aspects of reality that dominate our collective response to the present and near future.<p>If you eliminate all of these functions and just let a few official sources fill the news-hole, it is not as though non-objective analysis will disappear. Far from it. Instead, all non-objective but authoritative-sounding analysis will come only from those with the greatest economic and political power. In short, you will have a fascist propaganda machine.<p>(There is constant rebellion against the tendency of the press to enrich its pockets by turning away from the wild speculation and radical analysis. Uh... Hunter Thompson was one symptom of that rebellion a few years back. More recently, I suppose that the "right wing talk radio" crowd is another symptom of the same tendency to rebel against simply receiving truths and their interpretation from the powers that be. Tech is a microcosm different in topic, not kind from the general field of national news reporting: people fight over which facts to highlight and how to interpret them. Some reporters are supposed to be in there slugging it out.)
Wait a minute. The TechCrunch coverage on Larry Page replacing Eric Schmidt is a simple 4 paragraphs of editorial. It also simply states facts and doesn't include conjecture or spun opinion. See for yourself: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/google-ceo-change/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/google-ceo-change/</a> It may not contain the same level of information potency, but it's not drawn out gossip either.<p>Also, the other post sort of on the topic simply includes the author's account of development of the story, about how he was going to break it beforehand. Similarly, it's pretty straightforward without a lot of unnecessary fluff. It's here: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/techcrunch-interview-with-eric-schmidt-larry-page-and-sergey-brin/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/techcrunch-interview-with-e...</a>
As a newbie in the blogging culture in Silicon Valley, I honestly can't agree more. I want to see more of this style of reporting and I try pretty hard to do it myself.<p>I guess I'm what you'd call a "classically trained" journalist. So maybe I'm just feeling a little pretentious or annoyed at the state of things out here. But 99 percent of the time it feels like people are too damn lazy to pick up the phone and call their sources — or even shoot them an email and ask for a quick comment. I <i>almost</i> fell into that trap when I first joined the technorati out here but have since reverted to my own personal instincts of actually talking to people for stories (I know, what a concept, right?)<p>For a new face in silicon valley it's honestly extremely discouraging and frustrating — not only seeing it in other blogs but from my co-workers from time to time at VentureBeat as well. It's even more discouraging to be encouraged by my editors from time to time to simply bust out a story without any additional reporting. I feel pretty proud that I have not done a straight reblog without additional reporting in more than a month when it's merited.<p>Naturally, some stories don't demand that kind of additional reporting. So there's a place for analysis, commentary, and the like. I'll be damned if I end up as an MG Siegler-type reporter that injects opinion/praise/vitriol in every single article I write, though. I don't really see that opinion changing any time soon, either.<p>(Edit for quick background: former Reuters reporter, graduated in 2010.)
Unfortunately, Internet journalism has become primarily about speed -- so the fastest to report or even speculate wins on aggregation services -- thus the lions share of the traffic.
The sad thing is that "tech" journalism is amongst the least biased out there. I have come to hate watching the news (blogs included). Journalism has become a relentless quest to instill emotions rather than just inform. Blogs originally appeared as an opportunity for journalists to throw in facts up top and let opinions brew down bottom, so that every one could find what they were looking for, but how many times have you found yourself infuriated by some idiotic speculations mingled with half truths posted by a "respectable" source in the blogosphere?
Ken Auletta got outstanding sources at Google because he had already climbed his way to the top of the journalistic food chain. If he hadn't, his sources would not have spoken with him. See also: why can't all students with decent grades get into Harvard, why can't all soccer teams starting with my child's under-8 squad win the World Cup, why Warren Buffet returns Barack Obama's phone calls but not yours, etc. People at the top of one hierarchy want access to the tops of external hierarchies they deal with.
Actually, the only difference here is a semi-clear narrative and decent writing. What indication is there that this is any less off-base than a thousand other speculations?
The elephant in the room question is why Kottke never writes anything original? Every one of his posts (including the linked one) is a quote or an embed. Yet this hasn't prevented him or TC, etc. from having a widely read blogs. He is an aggregator or a curator. We need less curators and more writers.
One could say the same about journalism in any subject. It's cheaper and often as profitable to pump out shallow celebrity gossip and infotainment than to put out factual reporting and well thought out commentary.<p>If you're wondering at a higher level why this is so, the simple answer is that almost all modern journalism is ad supported. Attracting eyeballs matters for the bottom line, how much people value or even believe what you report is irrelevant as long as you can mantain viewership.
The New Yorker is pretty much the standout print publication of our age (certainly in the US). Expecting everyone to be this good is understandable but unrealistic.
Achieving zero bias is among the most difficult things to write in journalism, even in something as seemingly binary as technology. A bigger question might be "was the answer any different than what you imagined it would be?"<p>Even if journalism is far from objective, I think people are good at making inferences as to what really happened in the articles they read (at least in this crowd).
This is so true! It happens to on nearly every tech article that the author just pushed the buttons and turned a three paragraphs info in a murder-tech-blog-murder-looking-article.
The bad thing about it is that you can't more out of those articles as you could from those "original" three paragraphs.<p>It's not that article size or letter count matters to all of us. I just want to get informed the right things. No long history telling, cause mostly I know it cause I hang around in this area everyday and for more I have Wikipedia. No long opinions and suggestions, cause most time I don't care or I disagree. No long mambo-cambo which let's me ask "Wait. What did I just read".<p>More of those short, quality and informing articles please.
We should look at ourselves when we ask why. Especially in tech, everyone just <i>loves</i> to be opinionated. Look at at least half of all the blog posts that make it onto this site, for instance.
I don't get it. What properly sourced facts? Since when does adding an occasional "according to a close advisor," or "according to associates" count as proper sourcing? Proper sourcing means that an independent third party could verify the claims. The article is very even handed, and may even be correct, but at face value it's nothing more than the author's opinion and unsubstantiated references to unknown people.
Most tech journalism is purposefully dumbed down to appeal to a wider audience. Just like reports on government economic policies don't include references to specific economic theories and complex equations.<p>In this case, the article is purely factual, so it's also short. If the editor has some pages to fill, he wants it long, and to pad out the article, a journalist will fill it with fluff opinions and emotional statements.
While in theory, I support the massive potential for new media to democratize journalism, right now we're at a point where the standards are simply not yet in place. Bloggers and online journalists are the cowboy coders of the early days of the web. A necessary transition, but sweet Jesus, can the results be ugly most of the time.
i like techcrunch. they call it a blog, not a newspaper/journalism.<p>the cited article contains nothing to read, i think the same: google has issues, the leadership changes, nothing strange. sure i'm glad that people say (and print) the same, but sometimes it's interesting to read some contrary, longer or personalized blog post.<p>and, techcrunch lets me be closer to the Valley while being far overseas
There's a difference between writing with the sole aim of getting it out first (so that TechMeme gets you first or you get the most retweets) and writing a good analysis of a story.<p>That's why, imho, blogs can never replace real publications. Pick up The Economist or The New Yorker and you still get a lot of added value and insight, even if the events happened days earlier.