Vance on what’s wrong with tech coverage

Mark Yarm of Depth Perception interviewed former Bloomberg News journalist Ashlee Vance — who recently launched his own operation called Core Memory — about what he sees as the main problem with technology coverage.

Here is an excerpt:

When Semafor covered the launch of Core Memory, you told Ben Smith, “A lot of what I read in the mainstream media on tech feels like activism to me, and people who are very slanted in their point of view.” Who did you have in mind when you said that?

You’re gonna get me in trouble, but let’s do it. A lot of the publications that would immediately come to mind to a lot of people: the New York Times, the Washington Post, even Bloomberg, to a degree. Maybe a little less the Wall Street Journal.

We went through this weird transition where it was like, yes, I think journalists were probably too soft on tech companies. For a long time, tech was exciting. It was this new thing, and they were afforded a lot of slack that politics and sports and business don’t get. And then, around the 2016 election, there was such a backlash against Facebook and what the internet had wrought. And I think the pendulum has just swung back too far.

If I go to the New York Times and I look at the tech section, it does not strike me that many of the reporters are actually interested in what they’re writing about. I do not want to be a propagandist or anything like that. I just have a very genuine, deep interest in science and technology and approach the stories from this baseline of actual curiosity. As opposed to most of the stories I read, it feels like the starting point is hostile.

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