Categories: OLD Media Moves

Why tech gadget lovers sometimes hate biz reporters

CIO staff writer C.G. Lynch assesses the relationship between business journalists and their readers and comes to some conclusions as to why lovers of everything Apple, Linux and Facebook, to name a few, sometimes hate the reporters who write about those products.

Lynch wrote, “One is spineless web-rage. The ability for fanboys to post anonymously, or, in this case, to shout like mongrels from the middle of a conference venue, has allowed them to cross the line into being downright disrespectful while hiding behind their strength in numbers.

“Secondly, collective intelligence (as spawned by user generated content and social technologies) and the mob mentality arenâ€™t one and the same, and these fanboys have frequently opted for the latter. They go after the messenger rather than the actual facts. If the journalist says or writesÂ something that displeases them or is construed as slighting their technology (or hero) of choice in any sort of way, they lose it (and usually go over the top, because you can tell they enjoy the sport of it).

“The last issue: a great many business journalists, often concerned with the big picture, don’t always write stories and ask questions with the type of granularity that fanboys might like. The Facebook keynote served as a fine example of this. If people were expecting a BusinessWeek reporter to ask the world’s most exciting newÂ business leaderÂ nitty-gritty questions about application development and widgets, they might have hired the wrong person for the job.”

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Nan Connolly says:
March 24, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Thanks Chris, for highlighting this excellent piece from CIO, which I don't normally see. The author's cogent point about fanboys as a braying pack of anonymous critics is spot on. The term "doctrine of insufficient adulation" has been bandied about elsewhere in describing this mentality. Apple fans are famously thin-skinned about anything written or posted that doesn't read like company p.r. or a Steve Jobs speech. Perhaps fanboys' lack of experience with MSM is the root. American car makers were once this arrogant, until alternatives allowed consumers to compare and contrast. Will the same fate befall the "worship us or else" tech firms the fanboys so ardently support? Can biz reporters help sort this out for the average tech customer, who just wants the best their money can buy?