Categories: OLD Media Moves

Tech coverage ignores major players

CNET blogger Dave Rosenberg reports about a study from ITDatabase of tech coverage in major business media in the past six months that shows that large companies don’t get their fare share of the coverage.

Rosenberg writes, “The eight publications surveyed are: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, Financial Times, and USA Today. Over a period of six months, ITDatabase measured coverage by the number of times a tech company was mentioned in print and online in these publications, including blogs such as All Things Digital, which is affiliated with the Journal. (Disclosure: I am an adviser to ITDatabase.)

“Enterprise IT is woefully underrepresented, despite being the cash-cow in the industry. ‘In the overall editorial agenda,’ the report says, ‘enterprise IT is treated like consumer tech’s snaggletoothed twin. It barely even makes the family photo.’

“Oracle ($22 billion in revenue, $5 billion in profits) only cracks the top 10 companies by coverage for one of the eight publications examined: Fortune. Cisco ($40 billion in revenue, $8 billion in profits) didn’t make it on anyone’s top 10 list. IBM ($100 billion in revenue, $12 billion in profits) wasn’t even in The New York Times’ top 20, and was No. 19 for The Wall Street Journal.

“These are tech vendors with billions in profits that are largely ignored by business press, and there are tech categories with enormous worldwide revenue (enterprise categories in particular like storage, virtualization, network infrastructure) that are barely even acknowledged.”

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Joey says:
March 8, 2010 at 6:22 am
As soon as those guys explain to me how to get a fresh angle on the existence of Microsoft Word, or on the plain fact that Oracle products are too expensive and SAP implementations are a nightmare, I'll start listening to them. Much of the 'news' about large players is simply a quarterly update of the news from three months ago-- same old, same old. Tech startups are what is new and interesting, so they get the attention. I can't believe anyone is surprised by that.