“It’s he-said-she-said journalism at its finest. Security expert says Microsoft patches seem to cause fatal crashes, and Microsoft denies it! Who’s right? Hey, we’re just the press, we don’t know. You decide!”
This is exactly what is wrong with all journalism, not just tech journalism. Political writing suffers from this malaise even more.
I always find it a little incredulous when people proclaim the death of journalism. Most claims over the last few years were really about the death of newspapers, or even more specifically, the death of the print news business model. However, journalists and the companies they work for sure aren’t doing themselves any favors.
“The idea that IDG was chasing a fast-moving story in real time is absurd. IDG publications weren’t chasing the story, they were leading it.”
I get it: stories need to be even more timely in our modern, always-connected age. More importantly however, they need to be accurate. But when you write a story from the “he-said-she-said” perspective, or you actively push a story where one does not exist, you are not practicing journalism, you are practicing stenography.
So maybe journalism is dying—but if so, it’s because the journalists are killing it.
