Is it me or it the quality of tech journalism at an all time low?  It seems that most are either talking about iPods (which I doubt they own, tech journalists are usually scruffy and Apple don't sell them to scruffy people, at least not in person) or brandishing buzzwords that are way out of their age range in much in the same way that an 8 year old would wave around a .44 Magnum when really they should stick with the .38.

I blame blogs.  Back when Tech Journalists were forced to scratch out articles with a quill and those articles were printed in magazine bought by people who wanted a regular supply of hamster bedding, bluffing was easy and the system worked because no one ever noticed that the articles were rubbish.  Enter the 21st century and they have all "found" blogs they have a direct pipeline to people who are actually technical (that is, that's what they do for a living rather than it just being a job title) and know what they are talking about.  Bluffing it is now not so easy.  The status quo remains though - the only people who "believe" tech journalists are people who don't understand the technologies involved, the rest of us just get to have a giggle.

The typical article by a tech journalist goes something like this:

"Blah blah blah blah Web 2.0 blah blah blah blah iPod blah blah blah blah Apple blah blah blah blah evil Microsoft blah blah blah blah Open Source is great blah blah blah blah Linux blah blah blah ..."

The details don't matter because they're either made up, wildly distorted or inaccurate.

I know I'm generalising here and there are a handful of tech journalists that actually know what they are talking about, do research and actually bother with the details but an awful lot don't.  More and more I'm deleting feeds from my feed reader (because as yet I've not perfected the device for sending electric shocks across the web).  Yes, I'll miss the odd speck of gold but I'm not worried.

This cartoon is a generalization, but I'm only interested in general trends!

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This entry was posted by the PC Doctor on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 10:19 and is filed under PC Doctor's Thoughts, Cartoons. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.