commbasics

A corporation has a vested interest in growing the trust of their customer base. Without an independent voice outside of the company (as in the semiconductor industry) they can’t survive in the market with their typical marketing BS. They need to provide trusted content. The tech media world is all atwitter (pun intended) over the collapse of GigaOm yesterday. Yes, it was a loss. The site was one of the first of the tech blogs, it was among the most respected in a world filled with self-aggrandizing click baiters (e.g. The Verge, Venture Beat and Tech Crunch ), and it offered what may be the deepest, most thoughtful coverage of the tech world, from semiconductors to gaming. But it could not make enough money to stay alive, much less give back some of the $22 million it took in from investors. Above the wailing laments of the reading public is a steady drumbeat of independent tech journalists claiming they have discovered the secret of profitable journalism in the tech world. Among th...

Cadence Design 's Brian Fuller dusted off his personal blog on Journalism last week and asked a question he's asked before: Are journalists/editors necessary? The question comes on word of two major personnel losses at EE Times -- Dylan McGrath and Peter Clarke -- and is one that I answered in the affirmative several months ago.  But as I read his piece I was struck by one particular graf. "But there’s a sense of unhappiness in our ranks. We can crank out that content all day long, but if there’s no one to validate it or call B.S., then we become an industry of echo chambers." If that's the way veteran journalists respond to the changes in the industry, then we should despair.  But I think, now, that Brian's asking the wrong question.  Are independent publications necessary?  My answer is, not as much as in the past. This is something I've said in other ways in the past, but I think journalists have lost a bit of spine in the past ...