Journalism
On the fine art of technology reviews
Nearly thirty years ago I reviewed my first product. It was a Lexmark solid ink inkjet printer, created for designers to do lower-cost but higher quality proofs than were possible on the regular inkjets, expensive colour laser printers, or super-expensive Chromalin machines of the time.
Its launch was also the first press conference I went to. I remember nothing of the event, but I do distinctly remember meeting some of the trade press journalists from the magazines about printing (trade press was VERY large) who promptly took me down the pub. I spent a happy couple of hours getting paid to drink in the middle of the day, and realised I had found my ideal job.
I have no idea how many products I have reviewed over the years, but it’s likely to be several hundred single reviews and even more if you count group tests. All of which makes me think that I know a bit about reviewing.
Unlike Daniel Vassallo:
“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.
Ben Thompson hits the nail squarely on the head:
“Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely, the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.”
Vassallo has taken something of an online beating for this. The idea that telling the people who ultimately pay your wages – those who read your content or watch your videos – the truth about a product is “almost unethical” is indicative not just of Vassallo’s views, but those of the tech executives who have grown up in the last 20 years. The fact that the Humane AI Pin is a lemon is not MKBHD’s fault.
But Vassallo is really just expressing a view that’s part of the present Silicon Valley/venture capital paradigm. Why make a great product when you can make a so-so product and erect moats which turn into monopolies, locking customers in? The Rot Machine is real, and once you buy into it as a business model is not love of great products but a mastery of the mechanisms of stopping people going elsewhere. Customers become users, and who owes users anything? They just use what you supply, and should be grateful for it.
What technology companies hate is that good reviewers have power. And they wield that power not for the company’s investors and shareholders, but for the people who have to work hard and earn money to buy their products. Excellent reviewers can even end up helping improve the products, as Walt Mossberg often did:
“XM is only one of dozens of companies that have redesigned products in response to Mossberg's unsparing criticism. RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.”
No wonder this generation of tech entrepreneurs would rather that reviewers shut up and gave them four stars.
Just why do journalists love Twitter so much?
Om Malik highlighted a survey by Muckrake which shows a bigger proportion of journalists expecting to spend more time on Twitter in the next year than less:
To anyone following the trajectory which Twitter under Musk has taken this makes no sense at all. The service suspended the accounts of journalists who criticised him. It curtailed efforts to prevent attacks on women journalists, leading to an upsurge in more attacks. It reinstated the accounts of far right activists who had been suspended because of threats to journalists. It has deliberately reduced the reach of posts mentioning Substack, a platform which many journalists use to directly reach audiences.
And of course this is in addition to providing a safe harbour for bigots, racists, homophobes, transphobes, anti-semites, anti-vax myth peddlers, climate change deniers, and mass murderers who have been charged with war crimes.
So why do journalists appear so reluctant to even reduce their time on Twitter, let alone abandon what’s obviously a dying platform which is slowly choking on the hate that Musk is encouraging?
There are a few factors at play. The first is that most journalists are incredibly conservative when it comes to new technology of any kind. Journalists were slow to understanding blogging and how it was going to change publishing. They were slow to social media: as Anil Dash points out, “prestige media won’t go to the fediverse for another 2 years, same lag where they didn’t think Twitter existed until after Ashton Kutcher legitimized it.”
The second is that almost universally journalists overestimate the amount of engagement and traffic which accrue from Twitter versus any other kind of social media. When I worked in audience development, I would often ask journalists who weren’t familiar with traffic numbers where they thought social traffic came from. Universally, they would put Twitter at the top.
In fact, referrals from Facebook dwarf Twitter, and they always have. Facebook accounts for 90% of social media traffic for publisher and news websites, 10x that of Twitter:
If what you care about is ordinary people reading your stories, you will get 10x the results from effort put into Facebook vs Twitter.
What you won’t get – and this is the important point – is 10x the attention from other journalists. Journalists love Twitter because it connects them to other journalists. It’s talking shop, and shop window for themselves and their work. Some journalists have made their careers through being noticed by other journalists on Twitter: there is an entire coterie of political journalists, for example, who have become “big beasts” because of the attention they get there, not from ordinary people, but from other journalists.
Journalism is an intensely social and sociable practice. It’s also often – particularly in newspapers - run on a “who you know” basis, which is one of the reasons that over half the top 100 journalists in the UK went to public school. Being able to parade your engagement skills on Twitter in front of your peers has helped people get jobs, and, at the very least, it can establish your name.
So no, I’m not surprised that journalists are clinging to Twitter like a life raft, despite the direct attacks from Musk, the bigotry, and the clear decline in the platform’s importance to ordinary people. It’s not about the plebs. It never was.
What is an "editorial line"?
Journalism isn't the most transparent of trades. And a trade it is -- despite the best efforts of all involved in my working education, I'll never think of journalism as a profession. But like all trades, it has its methods and modes of action, and people who aren't journalists often don't know what they are. One of the elements we don't talk about is the editorial line, what it is, and how it manifests itself in publications.
An editorial line is a set of beliefs about what is essential to your audience and desires to make that audience understand that certain things are important. Good journalism is balancing the two. Journalism which is only about what the audience cares about, is really just entertainment. Journalism which is only about what you believe is vital for the audience to start thinking about, is really just propaganda.
Editorial lines have an impact in two places. First, there's the selection of stories you choose to publish. "Magazine" comes from the Middle French word "magasin", which means a warehouse or store, and like a warehouse, it's a collection of disparate things chosen by humans. And, also like a warehouse, it's not finite: you can't publish every possible story. So instead, you must decide what stories to put together in your collection. So you are always choosing which stories to publish based on that balance of what the audience wants and what you believe is important for the audience to know or believe.
The second place the editorial line manifests is in the angle of the story. Every story has an angle, a direction which the writer wishes to take the reader along. Although the first duty of any reporter is to report the facts, you can't write all the facts: facts are interlinked and often rely on more facts to prove they are true. So you have to choose what facts to report.
And, of course, you have to interest the reader, which means moving them along in the story, keeping them engaged with it as you go. This is why salaciously-written stories are often so successful: salacious comes from the word salire, which means to leap on something with lust. Salire is also the root of salient, as in "the salient point" -- something all good reporters get to as quickly as possible to draw the reader into the story.
How you draw people into a story -- how you choose which points are salient, whether something needs to be salacious, and so on -- depends on the editorial line. But, of course, you might not have an explicit editorial line on every topic. Still, you have a good idea of what the audience is interested in, which is how the audience feels about the world and what things your publication believes they need to care about more (or less). Based on that, you can understand what points are salient to them in a story.
Are editorial lines set by the politics of the owner and editor? Partly: but more important in any publication is the politics of the intended audience. Remember, you're not trying to brainwash them: if you are, then you are propagandists, not journalists.
On David Carr and 20 years of journalism
Originally published: 13th February, 2015
When I started my career as a journalist in 1995, I realised pretty quickly that despite my skills as a writer, I knew precisely nothing about being a reporter. Being able to write is table stakes, something which gains you entry to the door marked “journalism” but doesn’t actually make you a reporter. Everyone can write. Not everyone can report.
I remember the moment I realised what the difference was clearly. My first real reporting task, after a month or so of menial work in the testing labs, involved going along armed with a notebook and eager as anything to a press conference for the release of a Tektronix printer1.
The reporting didn’t take place at the press conference, which was as staged and dull as these things always are. Instead, it took place afterwards, in a bar, with some of the old-school printing trade press journalists (in the days when there was such a thing as the printing trade press). Listening to them talk, I realised the fundamental thing: Journalism is gossip. Professionalised, occasionally slightly pissed, but gossip nevertheless. I could do this. I had never wanted to be a journalist, but suddenly and permanently I had found my home.
And boy did it feel good. For the next ten years or so, I did every kind of technology journalism: reviews, features, columns, and my favourite of all, news. Newswriting was always the best kind of reporting because it was the place where you could really make a mark – or at least you could if you were any good. And MacUser lived on its exclusives, on stories which other Mac publications didn’t even get a sniff of. We prided ourselves on getting stories which companies really didn’t want to be published. Our duty was the readers, and we were fierce about getting the truth for them. If it was revealing a new product’s upcoming release, thus killing off sales of a previous model, so what? We’d saved our readers from buying a dud. If that company then got so outraged at our behaviour they pulled advertising, then fuck ’em – whether you advertised or not didn’t get you any influence on the editorial. Companies knew it, too.
How do you get the stories before anyone else? By gossiping. By understanding that reporting is about people, relationships, who you know, how you talk to them. We bandy around the phrase “cultivating sources”, but all that means is getting to know people and getting them to trust you. Never selling sources down the river, but always being aware of what someone is telling you and why they are telling you.
I’m reminded of all this by the death of David Carr. Carr wasn’t just an average reporter: he got under the skin of his chosen beat, and knew that reporting was fundamentally about people. Watch Carr at work in “Page One”, the documentary which is nominally about his employer but which turns quickly into the David Carr Show. Look at the way he talks on the phone, the easy venom which he drips on the hapless founders of Vice, who, despite their supposed new media smarts, come across like amateurs. This is a man who understands journalism is about people. As his colleague A. O. Scott puts it:
“What else?” was the question that would punctuate every conversation with him. What were you working on? What did you think of this or that political event, show-business caper or piece of office gossip? How was your family? What were you thinking? This was sincere, friendly curiosity, the expression of a naturally gregarious temperament. But it was also the operation of a tireless journalistic instinct. David was always hungry for stories. He was a collector of personalities and anecdotes, a shrewd and compassionate judge of character. A warrior for the truth.
The fundamental thing about journalism remains the same as it’s been for a hundred years: Whatever you do, get the story. Everything else is ancillary. And stories come from, and are about, people. Remember that the next time some journalistic pundit with a safe job in a university calls publishing “a technology business”.