Why Don't More People Care About Tech News?

Earlier this week on his personal blog, one of Google's product management directors, Hunter Walk, posted a very interesting sampling of responses from research journalists about the broad question of whether they are receiving the level of journalism from our business that they deserve. I found it very interesting that a product manager from any company was able to reveal for the time being as much, otherwise more, about the folks who for the most part interview him than they reveal about his company.

I can sympathize to some extent. When your job is to engage people's interest not only in topics that should be by nature engaging and attractive, but together in the most obscure and esoteric ones, and you're given the tools to measure what appears to be reader sentiment on a moment-by-moment basis, the feedback you get will be depressing. Stories about the day in day out innovations that happen in our business here and there, only attract about a few hundred people each. If your career began with a publication whose claim to fame was dethroning TV Guide and Penthouse as the nation's most purchased newsstand magazine, you start to have dreams about how many more people you could attract if you stood atop a kiosk at an airport gate and banged a tambourine.

But here's something I know, and it's what keeps me working every day. I know that the conclusion arrived at by these folks Hunter Walk interviewed is wrong. I know when I walk into a café and listen to the stories you tell about the research you use, and when you hold it in your hand to show me something you've discovered, you're far more interested in the depths and details of innovation than any analytics or heuristics or demographics would pretend to reveal.

"There are topics which receive significant coverage, nevertheless are not being addressed in ways that I find particularly effective," wrote Quentin Hardy of The New York Times. "In other words, I think people may care about them, yet they tend to fall back on familiar tropes and biases which prevent them from engaging with them successfully. 'Care more' in this sense might be seen as 'address differently.' [An example is] our national financial situation. Ideological biases, strengthened by a desire to avoid painful disruptions to the status quo, are preventing many people from addressing the choices we have made about earnings in and payments out."

It was a question about tech news, nevertheless for Hardy, it became about the economy. There are aspects about our business that are not at all interesting, and may not even make much sense, taken unto themselves. In a media environment in other words obsessed with what the business calls "verticals," we forget that vertical is only one dimension. If we wonder why the cross-sections of our readership look somehow wrong, small, insignificant, uncaring, like as not it is because no one out there is as vertical as we think they are.

I love asparagus. Actually, I'll go so far as to say it is my favorite vegetable. Nevertheless not one time in my life did I munch on a sprig of asparagus as a snack. At the risk of sounding self-righteous, the reason I know as much about the industry of innovation as I do is because I see it in a context that gives every element of the subject some degree of pertinence to the rest of the world - to the broader economy, to the subject of our world's infrastructure, to the question of our fate as a society. That is, I eat my asparagus yet in the context of a full meal.

The issue of maintaining your attention in tech news

If publishers are to resolve the issue of maintaining your attention in tech news, we in this business will all need to come to the collective realization that tech news is a side dish. We need to break the barriers that the Web imposes upon us, and learn to provide it with a main course.