Tech journalists and the Murdoch hearings

Dan Mitchell of SFWeekly wonders why many tech and business journalists are spending so much time covering the News Corp. phone hacking hearings in England.

Mitchell writes, “I’ll give media reporters a pass, I suppose (and yet, even there, what’s the point?). But why are general business columnists and bloggers, technology journalists, and U.S. political writers spending their mornings hijacking my tech-news Twitter feed?

“Some of my favorite writers are doing this — Felix Salmon, who covers finance. Larry Magid, who covers geeky tech stuff, and even Jim Fallows, who writes about a wide variety of subjects including China, Microsoft, and the Obama Administration. The technology site AllThingsD (run by Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal) is live-blogging the hearings, as if they were on a par with John Dean revealing the crimes committed by the Nixon Administration.

“Blogger Kara Swisher is even calling the scandal (ugh) ‘PhoneGate.’

“To some degree, I suppose, people are simply doing this because they can. Twitter, for example, is still a new mode of dissemination, and much of this is simply people playing around with it to see how it should be used. I would guess that in five years, if Twitter or something like it still exists, there will be relatively little ‘live-tweeting’ of relatively mundane events.

“Still. All that’s happening here is that a couple of execs are lying and covering their asses. It’s news, but it’s not earth-shattering news. Certainly, having tech reporters whose usual beats are Cisco and Google cover it is more than a bit of a stretch. But clearly, ‘the Internet’ is ‘reacting’ to it, so.”

Read more here.