This episode, co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard spend more time talking with long-time technology journalist and journalism professor, Dan Gillmor. Gillmor gives his personal experience on the dos and don’t of covering technology, including what journalists should look out for. The co-hosts asked Gillmor for advice on how young journalists can get started in the field and how to balance covering a company that may be an integral part of your daily life, like Apple and Google, with journalistic integrity.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: The do’s and don’ts of covering the tech world.
Dan Gillmor: It’s fine to be a fan at one level. What I think is dangerous is to become kind of a fanboy or fangirl about the people doing the topic.
Maynard: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me is our co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite alum and a reporter and anchor at KTAR News. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. Today we bring you Series 2, Episode 5 of How to Cover Money, and today we’re continuing our conversation with Dan Gillmor, who’s one of the country’s best known technology journalists.
Maynard: That’s right. Last week, we talked to Dan about the big picture of where technology is today and all the dangers and opportunities that covering tech offers for journalists. This time, Dan is talking to us about what it’s like to actually cover tech and some of the things that journalists have to think about when they get a little too cozy with the tech companies. This is an area that is fraught with peril, with ethical issues, and I’m really looking forward to hearing what Dan has to say.
Remillard: Yeah, technology can seem really complicated, but it’s actually really easy to get started.
Gillmor: I don’t think it’s difficult to break into tech blogging, because right now, there’s such a, I think, a bubble in technology journalism, that people are getting hired all over the place, either full-time or freelance, with or without a lot of experience. But the best way to start on anything, what I would say to any person who’s thinking about being a journalist of any kind, I would advise, among other things, starting a blog and pick a topic that you’re really passionate about. Don’t make it too broad. The more of a a niche it is perhaps the better. So if you if tech is something you want to do, find some part of tech that you want to become the go-to person in the blogosphere. Become that person who people turn to when they’re interested in that topic, because you get pointed to a lot and you point to others.
Remillard: This actually reminds me of what we’ve talked about with sports. One of the best ways to become a sports journalist is to start blogging about sports. And what he says there, you pick one thing that you’re just going to be the go-to person on, and that’s really the best way to get your foot in the door. I knew a guy that every time a new product came out, he would be, he would camp out to be one of the first people that got it, and it was a race for him to be the first one to be able to dismantle it. And so he could get inside the machine, pull it apart, and basically put “How to Guides” to how to fix the screen. That was, like his specialty, repairing things was his specialty, and so, and I remember one time he told me he got beat by like 15 minutes or something like that. And it just it made all the difference in the world as to whether or not he got hits on his blog, so it’s a little bit like sports.
Maynard: And I agree with that, because I think a lot of tech is covered in exactly the opposite way. You have everybody chasing the same thing. This is what drives me crazy about the way that tech is covered. They give everything equal weight. So there’s so much interest in tech right now that, you know, they had put everything that they can get up on their blogs or on their publications, or just because they have to fill air time, or they have to fill space, and I call that feeding the beast. I mean, you see it in political reporting. You see it in sports reporting. It’s this idea that “let’s just keep churning, churning, churning.” Actually, Dan told us he thinks it can be done in a more thoughtful way.
Gillmor: You know, I don’t think blogs have to be that, and I don’t, I don’t think they all are in any field. One thing a blog is good for is to note briefly something that’s interesting. Newspapers used to have things called reporters notebooks, which would be a bunch of brief items that were kind of stray mini stories that didn’t make it to the category of a real story. That’s blogging. And I thought of it as a place where I could do those things that were reporter notebook-ish, but where I would also explore with my audience, the stuff I was working on.
Remillard: Also speaking of sports, what’s interesting to me about this too, is that if you pick that one area of the of the blogosphere where you’re going to be the go-to person, you need to make sure that you’re still being, you have some integrity. That you’re not becoming too much of a fan. And that’s what you see in sports a lot of times too. You see, I think every sport has this problem, but I think maybe PGA golf is one of the worst. Like, you never hear them talk a single bad thing about any player. It’s just or any issue going on, because they’re all buddies and they’re all friends, and that’s that’s the thing that you want to avoid in tech journalism, just as much as in sports or any other kind of journalism. So people get way too excited about the things that they’re covering. And basically these are fanboys and fangirls. And there was a fake newscast from the onion that I saw years ago, and it absolutely cracked me up, because it was making fun of fanboys of Apple. And there was one guy in there. He says, “if it’s bright and shiny and made by Apple, I’ll buy it.” Again, so it doesn’t matter what it is, but it’s just, they’ll get it and they’ll they’re going to spend their hard earned cash on it. And so, as you might expect, Dan doesn’t really think too much of that kind of journalism.
Gillmor: I think it’s fine to be a fan at one level. I think it’s great to cover a topic because you’re passionate about the topic itself. What I think is dangerous is to become kind of a fanboy or fangirl about the people doing the topic. And in the case of technology, the worship of certain companies worries me a lot. because it’s obvious and it doesn’t seem to do much for journalism. Apple is at the top of the list. I think there’s a pretty big fan club for Google, for Amazon. The rush to cover every little new thing that happens in tech is sparked a lot by the blogs, which are numerous and very much not the same but very similar in many ways. And the ones that break away from the noise often don’t get the same number of page views, which is too bad. But you know, it’s a topic that people can monetize through advertising in particular, and as long as churning out page viwes is the coin of the realm, we’re going to get tremendously trivial stuff.
Maynard: It’s interesting to hear Dan talk about this because there’s a sea change in thinking about traffic. So for our audience that isn’t really aware of that, traffic is the number of people who come to your website. So for years and years and years, we’ve been measuring website effectiveness in terms of page views, or how many people look at your story. Now there’s the thought that you can play with page view numbers, like if you wrote a story about the Apple Watch and included a Kardashian, your page views would go off the charts. But Kardashian fans are not there to read about the Apple Watch. They’re really there to read about Kardashians. So do you really want them, or do you want people who are there to look at the Apple Watch? So there’s a thinking that this rush for page views now has probably not really helped these websites, because they are a way to draw people in, but what you want to do is keep them, and you actually want to get the audience that’s there for what you’re doing. So I think one of the things that we’re seeing now is going to be a reflection on what has all happened with this drive to just attract people to your website. And of course, people are interested in this because of advertising, because they have to monetize their sites, have to get people coming in. And you know, Dan is very transparent about what he does. He’s really transparent on his website about the companies that he consults with. He’s transparent about the boards that he sits on, the companies that he owns stock in, and the places where he speaks. And I think that Dan is really a leader in this area of being honest with the audience about what he’s really up to. So he told us that he thinks it’s very important for all journalists to be as open as he is.
Gillmor: If one’s breaking into this solo way and you have anything that might raise a question in someone’s mind if they found out about it afterwards, better to tell them ahead of time. That feels like a good rule. I think this is why transparency is so important. And I think bloggers, by the way, are leagues more transparent in most cases than traditional media about conflicts that are not apparent. So again, I think the ethics I sum up my journalistic ethics and those five principles of accuracy, thoroughness, fairness, independence and transparency. And I don’t always succeed in all of them, but I try pretty hard.
Remillard: I really think that what he’s getting at there is this just this principle of fairness that you know, people ought to know where you’re coming from. They should know where you’re coming from as a reporter, they should know where you’re coming from as a blogger. It doesn’t really matter if you’re out there to inform people on newsworthy events and things like that, they should know where you’re coming from. And like you said, what products you use, things like that, to make sure that you’re at least being honest and fair about what you’re covering. And that’s some really good advice that Dan had.
Gillmor: Staying with it, being fair to people is incredibly important, even if you have a strong opinion. And I think ideally blogs are done with a human voice, with a world view, but with some journalistic principles behind them, like thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, some level of independence. And that’s a complicated word, and I would add transparency.
Maynard: I’m really glad that Dan made the time to talk to us. You know, this tech business is so huge and touches so many people, and it’s one of those things that almost falls beyond traditional business journalism, because there’s kind of business journalism and tech journalism, and because of the fanboys, the fangirls, tech journalism is seems like it’s moving off into a different direction than traditional business journalism. So it’s really important to keep talking about the issues that Dan has raised in our last two episodes.
Remillard: Next week, we’re going to hear about journalism from the editor’s point of view. We’ll be talking with Kim Quillen. She was in charge of the business section at the New Orleans Times Picayune during Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill. Now she’s at the Arizona Republic.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. Visit our website, businessjournalism.org. You can sign up for our daily newsletter, Must Read Money Stories, which will give you story ideas that you can cover wherever you are. You can also see a calendar of all of our upcoming workshops and find information on how to enter the Barlett and Steele Awards for investigative business journalism. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
[Outro Music]
