Fanboy vs. Journalist

Sarah Lacy, a former Businessweek tech reporter who now writes for TechCrunch, writes about the difference between writers who fawn over new companies and their gadgets and journalists who critique them carefully.

Lacy writes, “I have no problem championing a business – even an unsexy or unpopular one. When I was at BusinessWeek I was one of the first people to write about a lot of Silicon Valley companies like Facebook, Yelp, and Digg, and over the last two years I’ve written here about even more unknown companies from around the world that I think have a shot at building something big and making the world a better place. That’s what I love about my job, and why I’ve done it for more than ten years.

“But that’s not being a fanboy. I just can’t get excited about a stunning product if it doesn’t solve a core problem or make some sort of business sense. Product for sheer product sake is writing about technology in a vacuum.

“That’s why I’ve been one of the only reporters to consistently question Spotify’s promises of near-term US launches and profitability. (Yep, still haven’t launched here, if you’re keeping track. We’re almost a year after the first ‘guaranteed’ date, FWIW.) And it’s why– despite whiling away most of my time on my recent 20-hour international flights playing on the iPad– as a business reporter I’ve never thought the device would be an immediate mass market hit for one simple reason: As of now, it is a beautiful solution to an unarticulated problem. The first person I knew who had one gasped and said, ‘This is a product everyone wants they just don’t know it yet.’ Exactly.”

Read more here.