Categories: OLD Media Moves

Tech4Reporters helps journalists understand technology

John Biggs, an editor-at-large at TechCrunch, has launched Tech4Reporters, a web project that links journalists with experts in the tech community free of charge to help solve the problem of journalists not understanding technology.

Jonathan Shieber of TechCrunch writes, “The project Biggs developed now reaches 171 journalists with information from a network of 661 technologists, and Biggs is hoping to expand the scope of the project even further.

“Unlike Quora or other knowledge-sharing social networks, Tech4Reporters is anonymous for the reporters that use it and the answers experts provide can only be seen by the reporter that poses the question.

“Other services have tried to pitch expert advice to journalists, but their success has been limited by so-called experts’ ability to game the system.

“The breadth of the network can also sometimes be a drawback. HelpAReporter, for instance, doesn’t focus exclusively on technology, and some reporters have said that its utility was diluted by that openness.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.