Inbetween doing other things this evening, I’ve been listening to “This Week In Tech” - a quite wonderful podcast I discovered while commuting into and out of London a couple of years ago.
They opened the show talking about the culture of blogging, versus old school journalism - the change to the “now”, rather than quality of content. It got me thinking about the well known tech news bloggers; the likes of Mike Arrington - and the pressures they face to respond to breaking news quickly.
In years past, a journalist might work on a story for some time - crafting their thoughts and opinions into an intelligible whole. A story might run for thousands of words - many pages of a print publication - and allow questions, opinions, and thoughts to be explored in depth.
Those days are gone.
Journalism - especially online journalism - has killed the longer form. The title, the first paragraph, and the immediately visible content are tailored to capture search engine’s attention. Online content is peppered with adverts, and links - designed purely to game the ranking algorithms employed by the search giants.
Whatever happened to trust, veracity, impartiality, and objectivity?
Somewhere along the line the engineers have become the editors, and I think that’s sad.