Swisher on what’s wrong with tech reporting

Jeff Wise of New York magazine interviewed Recode cofounder Kara Swisher about technology reporting.

Here is an excerpt:

You’ve said that the tech press is great at telling you about the new iPhone but not so good at doing investigative journalism. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about why that is.

I think with Wall Street reporters and D.C. reporters, there’s a price for being obstreperous. Access and other things. One of the good things about tech is there’s all these really cool products, there’s cool things to write about. It’s really interesting to write about the topics that are changing our society. It’s easy to write about the shiny new object. I don’t think we’re flacking for it, I think it’s really genuinely interesting. Some of these ideas about how we change the way we eat, or how we change the way we communicate, or the impact of technology on our culture — these are all really fascinating stories.

I think where it falls down is in criticizing this group of people. First, they’re not used to criticism, and unlike, say, a banker who sort of knows they’re kind of sketchy, people in Silicon Valley really think of themselves as world-changing, good people: “We know best because we’re so smart. And obviously we’re rich, so we know best.” So what you get is, if you write something that’s positive, they say, “Oooh, good journalism,” and if you write something tough, they’ll say, “Oh, that’s clickbait.” (That’s Trump’s favorite word now.) So if anything is even slightly critical they call it clickbait and they either get mad and deny access or they go right to Peter Thiel–ville, which is an appalling example of someone who clearly was wounded by press, doesn’t like that they wrote he was gay … and then pretended he was funding a lawsuit against Gawker for philanthropy. I don’t mind a good revenge plot, but I wish he would just say, “I don’t like that they did this to me and I’m getting back at them.” But his whole speech about how he’s helping humanity by putting this media company out of business is sort of the logical conclusion of people being very sensitive about things that are written about them.

Read more here.