Tech Journalism’s “Long Tail Effect”
A review of 2005 Irish tech journalism scene on John Collin’s blog mulling over the events and the shift of some Irish tech journos to Public Relations raised an interesting possibility: Could tech publishing have a “long tail” effect? Piaras Kelly’s blog had a post that seemed to confirm the possibilty.
Prior to a mass market, the publishing market would be specialist. In an early mass market, basically anyone can jump in because the barriers to entry are low and the knowledge requirements are low as well. Everyone is looking for information and they are not actively filtering. The tech publishing scene followed that model precisely in the dot.bomb era. There was an influx of journalists all writing about the web and technology for a general audience who could not tell the difference between fact and press release. At this point you could almost see the rise of the personality tech journalism where journos considered themselves more important than the story. These were the main targets for the PR people. Remember the end of the movie “The Devil’s Advocate”?
As the market changes from an early market to a mature market, some of the early players will fall by the wayside and some of the journos will disappear too. But those who are left tend, generally, to get better and develop a following. The crunch time is when the market matures. A lot of the journos that the PR people spent years cultivating will have disappeared from the field or have gotten jobs elsewhere.
A mature publishing market has high barriers to entry and the readership is more sophisticated. The new/learner readership segment has reduced and readers now consider themselves more clueful. The market that a lot of the early journalists were writing for has disappeared. At this stage the tech publishing market tends to be dominated by a few key players in the mass market side and a few specialist publications on the niche market side.
Many tech publications in Ireland shifted their emphasis from news to being a PR conduit though that happened years ago for some of them. ENN has managed to leverage that so that it has in effect become a PR content provider. It is quite a clever commercial exploitation of a niche but I wonder if it has done so by compromising its credibility as a news source. Siliconrepublic’s ties to the print world are probably essential to its survival. If it loses any of them, then it could have problems.
The Irish tech publishing market has too small an audience to support good news coverage so there is a temptation for editors to rely on press releases. Any tech publication has a mix of news/press releases/events/features/advertising. Getting this right is one of the hardest things for any publisher.
Press releases are a neccessary part of tech publishing but becoming reliant on them has a corrosive effect for the publication. In 2002, John O’Sullivan of DCU published a paper (Microsoft Word format) on newspapers and the effects of the web. It is a very interesting paper because you can see the attitudes of journalists who were struggling to cope with the effect of the web on journalism.
Tags: IrishBlogs, Publishing, Technology Journalism, HackWatch
Written by John McCormac on December 20th, 2005 with 3 comments.
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