Truthiness won't set you free.
A few weeks ago I started a discussion on Facebook on what goes into the creation of good content and that turned into the first in a series that ensued from the discussion. Don Tuite of Electronic Design magazine asked an interesting question regarding what makes a piece of content "truthy," an adjective created by comedian Steven Colbert. that question is a perfect example of what is wrong with content development today: the effort to make something seem true rather than try to make sure it is actually true.
Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece over on ZDNet on press-imposed censorship that fits in well as an example of what hampers the creation of good content. Foremski talks about the habit of B2B journalists to continually go to the well of what they consider "reliable" sources that invariably consist of the top players in a given industry.
I've pointed out it past posts that every journalist has subjective filters when it comes to covering news. A given subject can have as many as half a dozen legitimate sources for the news. The journalist goes through the list of previous sources for the topic for the first round, consisting of PR and executives. If need be a second round consisting of spokespeople from the top one or two players in the market will be contacted. Rarely is there a second round where the journalist contacts low-level players. That, however, may be exactly where the real information is.
During my early days as a journalist I learned that the best stories usually came from the people no one notices: A local Buddhist priest who turns out to be a Hiroshima survivor; the elderly man who raise parakeets and donates them to shut ins for company; the technologist who develops a new processor technology, once discarded by the industry, that actually resolves many of the problems with current processors. These were all hidden stories that had been around for years until I stumbled across them. That's what I was always taught was real news: something out of the ordinary.
Journalists today are under paid and over worked. They need to find ways to create as much content as they can with shrinking resources. And the major players in the market are more than willing to make sure the unusual never makes the light of day by giving the harried reporters and editors "special access" to the corridors of power. Those sources are dedicated to the concept of "truthiness."
Good content is not "truthy." It is true. More often than not it has to come from the unusual suspects. That's why at New Tech Press we impose a subjective filter of excluding the top players as often as possible (e.g. in our Semicon coverage we chose interviews with KLA Tencor, current number 4, as the lead interview...having been unable to get responses from Varian and Advantest).
Can traditional journalists ignore the top players? Probably not. There is too much pressure from publication management to keep the large potential advertisers happy and no pressure whatsoever from the lower-level companies who invest nothing in media buys. But the lower-level companies can make an effort to use social media strategies to share good content (not necessarily about them) and help journalists get a broader view.
More later.
I made my “truthiness” comment in the context of popular news reporting, Lou, but let take a roundabout way to get to talking about it in our world.
ReplyDeleteLet me begin with some observations about technical journalism as I practice it. To the extent that I understand them, my bosses want my features to appeal to the widest possible audience of people who care about the topics I choose. This is different than in the old controlled-circulation days. The new audience is global and comprises not only design engineers, but investors, professors, students, retired and otherwise terminally unemployed engineers, along with other kinds of people who just dig electronics. We still have our core constituency of 120k BPA-qualified print subscribers, but our on-line reach is many times larger and more diverse – and let me tell you, the metrics those good people generate is what drives the bottom line at Electronic Design.
So what do I do as a journalist? I contextualize. (Your J-school mentors would say I editorialize, and that’s bad, but, hey, my degree’s in Technical Communications.)
For example, the subtext in every technology story is off-shoring Jobs. Semi Companies don’t come up with new general-purpose parts any more. Their sales hinge on reference designs. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to talk to some guys about a chip that facilitates the design of gadgets that will tell your doctor your body-mass index without the need to take your clothes off. (Well, maybe your shoes.) That will come with a complete reference design that will make creating the end-product a trivial affair for manufacturers in China.
And the semi company has remote design centers overseas. Is this a crazy, suicidal business policy? Well, that meme has the appeal of truthiness. (I promised I’d get there eventually, didn’t I?) But the actual story, as I editorialize it, is more interesting. (And more comforting.)
First off, the product isn’t exactly putting engineers out of work, stateside. It’s just that, broadly speaking, they’ve moved from multiple small companies with small portfolios into this one big company, where they’re designing chip-scale products, rather than board-scale products. (Or they’re doing the board layout for the reference designs.) Some (actually many) are working as apps engineers, either at home, or in the Far East, pitching the product to rooms full of potential customers.
And those remote design centers? Funny thing, but it turns out that many of them are in this country. And much of the time, the ones in far off places, are interacting with domestic remote design centers. It even turns out that the reason for the existence of some (not all) of those RDCs is the presence, in those remote places, of some remarkable Ph.D. advisors and their grad students and post-docs. (And sometimes, it is, alas about the sun never setting on a design effort.
I did a feature story on those design centers for the June Electronic Design “State of the Industry” issue. The Web version is at http://electronicdesign.com/article/analog-and-mixed-signal/remote-analog-design-centers-reflect-reality-74033
So the truth is not particularly truthy. But given a little leeway in terms of reporting for a global audience composed of many types of people who would not be recognized in a BPA survey, it’s possible to take the bare facts and hit that audience again and again with technical communications that they look forward to seeing. (I hope.)