Tech journalists on Mastodon: "Mastodon Inc only has 50,000 users, but with adequate venture capital funding it may stand a chance"
More tech journalism on Mastodon: "Mastodon is currently a free service, but soon it will bend to the iron will of Silicon Valley, which is that you either sell out to investors or become irrelevant like Wikipedia."
Still more tech journalism on Mastodon: "Mastodon cannot survive with such a silly name. It needs a more serious and business-friendly name, such as Google, Yahoo, or Hulu."
It's almost as if tech journalists do the bare minimum of research before moving on to the next topic. Or that the tech industry has become so focused on chasing giant piles of money that nobody can remember a time when true successes on the internet were achieved by hobbyists working on passion projects with no regard for how much money they might make

@nolan
Tech journalism has become business journalism (unfortunately, since tech & business are mostly unrelated).

You can check with currently-working tech journalists on here but I assume some of the shallowness can be attributed to short deadlines. ( @sonya & @klintron can verify or refute)

@enkiv2 @sonya @nolan re: "tech & business are mostly unrelated." I don't even know how to respond to that. You think that technology isn't a major part of basically every business around today? Or that business considerations don't shape everything from hardware manufacture to user interface design?

@klintron @nolan @sonya

There's a circumstantial alignment of concerns. But tech is about as related to business as cooking is: both can be vital to businesses on both a minor and industrial scale (and more people eat than use computers), & certain segments are more integrated than others.

But restaurant reviews don't focus on catering & cookbooks don't focus on fast food, because the focus is on the end user in the normal case.

@sonya @nolan @klintron

Or, for another comparison, consider film journalism. Film is big business, and you get a certain amount of inside-baseball about the industry, but the ratio of inside-baseball to technical analysis in mainstream film journalism is lower than that of tech.

@enkiv2 @nolan @sonya The film industry comparison is more apt. There is a ton of non-business-y tech coverage, but there's a lot more tech biz coverage than there is coverage of most other industries. For most industries, business talk is relegated to trade publications, but that's not so in tech.
@sonya @nolan @enkiv2 A few inter-related things play into that, I think. For one, the biz side does matter more in tech than in, say, film. Who you get funding from will shape your company more than who you get funding from will shape your film. For another, a surprisingly large number of people are interested in reading insider basebally articles on the tech industry.
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