Feb
7
“Tech coverage these days tends to be fluffy, if not outright cheerleader-y, and Betabeat doesn’t work that way. When we started, I had a tech entrepreneur complain to me that because Betabeat wasn’t afraid to be negative that it “wasn’t being supportive of the industry.” I told him that Betabeat didn’t exist to support the industry; it existed to cover it. But it says something about the state of tech coverage generally that his expectation was we only write things that would benefit our subjects. Because much of the industry isn’t accustomed to being written about in terms that are anything less than glowing (and by glowing, i mean practically radioactive), some people don’t even know how to interact normally with journalists.”
- Elizabeth Spiers, Hiring! Betabeat, social reporters, commercial mortgages via spiersblr
I have to agree with Spiers, the editor of the New York Observer and BetaBeat: there is a decided tendency in the tech world to pull punches, or to never punch at all. Just consider the lovefest over the Facebook IPO.
(via stoweboyd)
(via stoweboyd)
Stephanie Booth is a freelance internet geek who lives in Lausanne, Switzerland. Digital Crumble is where she dumps all sorts of interesting stuff she finds online.
