Tech Press, fail

For a while, I monitored the tech press about Gear6's closure, and was darkly amused by it. All of the tech press and reporters that wrote about it were obviously cribbing from each other's texts, and they talked about Gear's "vanishing" and the lack of forthcoming information.

All of Gear6's customers had been told about it, and had had their support contracts transitioned. It seems that none of the tech press ever contacted any of them.

I was a "known face" of the company to the tech press. I had been on PR conference calls, had been interviewed, and had swapped emails. And yet, none of them ever contacted me to ask what had happened.

It was apparently easier to bang out yet another "me too" story about the "lack of forthcoming information" than it was for them to google their own past articles, pick out mine or anyone else's contact information, and write an email asking for information.

Anything that is not properly masticated and then pushed into the proper input hoppers, of a press release or a controlled interview, is called a "lack of forthcoming information". There seems to be a difficulty is seeing what isn't there, and a near complete lack of energized and directed curiosity brought to bear on illuminating discovered ignorance.

If I needed any more proof (which I didn't) that the tech press does very little "journalism" and nothing at all like any sort of "investigative journalism", that was it.

The job of digesting turgid hyperbole press releases and emitting CIO-friendly 4 column inch "articles" might as well go the way of the sovietologist or soothsayer.

Instead, let people and organizations just cleanly and conversationally write about what they are doing, and interested people go read it themselves.

This is not to say there is not a job for a "press". Some press-like things that do need doing are digging up and making known the things that powerful entities are NOT saying (muckraking), organizing the sea of information into learnable chunks (education), discovering and highlighting interesting stuff (curation), and generating informed prognostication (futurism).

And those things are being done, more or less (sometimes too much less). Often by skilled amateurs.

But almost none of it is being done by the most of what is currently the "tech press".