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| Volume 46, Number 3, Winter 1998-99 |
by Victor K. McElheny
Money and consumers. These are watchwords of the growing field of technology journalism, according to practitioners. It is a romance of the new. The dominant stories are software and computers and communications, but there are others, from biotechnology to meat-irradiation to light-emitting diodes in the brake lights of school buses.
Ivan Amato of National Public Radio, who noticed the bright brake lights when he was driving to work, says enthusiastically, “I’m amazed at how ubiquitous technology is. It’s absolutely everywhere. Everything you use is crammed with the history of technology.” Amato recently wrote a book, Stuff, on the future of materials science. He advocates looking at products ranging from the plastic “bags that breathe” to keep salad greens fresh to the polyurethane “noodles” widely used as flotation devices in pools and lakes.
Those covering technology face many challenges and pitfalls. Among them are calls from people trying to drive stock prices up and down, and editors who are starry-eyed about new technology and occasionally must be talked out of putting a story on page one.
They think technology reporting differs from science reporting. Focusing on pitches from public relations people, Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle says, “There is no similarity. Tech reporters in my experience are hounded…The science reporters get a much more restrained approach.”
Bob Johnstone of New Scientist in Melbourne, Australia, says, “I guess milieu is one big difference. Technology journalists have to operate in the world of commerce as well as in that of research.” Johnstone recently wrote a book, We Were Burning, a history of non-conformist Japanese electronics pioneers, which was based on many years of interviews while reporting from Japan.
Technology reporters agree that their audience includes investors, executives, engineers, scientists, hobbyists, and the general public. Some find themselves focusing on local developments, such as Jon Van of the Chicago Tribune, and others, like Amato, are looking for offbeat stories about technologies under everybody’s nose. All agree that there are too many stories to get to, and that agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and energy are underrepresented. They admit that they can cover only a fraction of the field. A tension exists between columns for hobbyists and aficionados and meeting the needs of business and other technology users who long for plain- language explanations.
Technology coverage has spread in recent years, beyond the hundreds of specialist trade magazines into mainstream journalism. Space and air time for technology journalism is growing. For evidence of the expansion of their field, technology reporters point to such developments as the foundation of Wired magazine a few years ago, followed by Red Herring, Fast Company, and Business 2.0. National Public Radio has appointed a technology editor, Chris Joyce. The New York Times launched a Thursday section on communications, called Circuits. Much of the coverage is in business sections, but it is not uncommon for newspapers to put technology stories on page one. Book-length reporting is no longer unusual.
As I talked with technology reporters, challenges for the new technology journalism occurred to me. Usually, the reporters do not have technical backgrounds or training. As with science reporters, they know how to get the facts and tell a story to the public. But how can they be expert enough to tell which of many possible stories is important?
Too much of the coverage, I think, is focused on the future, as if the reporters’ only job were to feed information to investors. Reporters and the public alike focus on the new gadgets that may find markets in the years ahead. Not enough coverage goes to the here and now, to the fields where things that millions use are changing every day, from the AC diesel power plants of freight trains to new procedures in the heart bypass surgery that hundreds of thousands undergo each year.
An example of needed reporting is Jerome Groopman’s January piece in The New Yorker, telling how surgeons are developing open-heart surgery without stopping the heart, hoping that a significant fraction of heart patients won’t need to go on the heart-lung machine. This could avoid often-noticed depression and reduced cognitive sharpness as patients recover. Michael L. Wald of the New York Times, sometimes more than once a day, focuses on systems that are screwing up now, particularly the air traffic system that carries more than twice as many passengers as it did before deregulation 20 years ago.
Because I am fascinated by how the technologies work, I am bothered by how much attention we have to give to things around the technology, not the thing itself. Much space goes to people stories: hirings, firings, promotions, transfers, and retirements. Equally prominent are reports of major stages in a company’s development: venture capital commitments, initial public offerings, mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, patent suits, or environmental regulations and fines. As reporters ultimately concerned with social decisions, we can never limit ourselves to new discoveries and inventions. To reach editors, and, through them, general readers, we must always go on to the business moves and political choices that are stimulated by the new technology. But I worry about the balance.
While technology coverage expands, says Elizabeth Corcoran, who covers Silicon Valley for Forbes Magazine, so does the amount and intensity of “p.r. hype.” She has been covering technology for more than 13 years, including her work for Scientific American. She complains, “The signal-to-noise ratio is getting weaker.” To get beyond the buzz to “real and meaningful trends,” she finds herself driven toward a version of traditional political reporting, where the usual question is, “Is this driven by ‘spin?’”
Technology is increasingly prominent in what might have seemed purely legal and political disputes. The Microsoft antitrust trial goes beyond a struggle between lawyers over how companies achieve dominance, or whether the public will pay more or less. Readers, viewers, and listeners also are told something about how Web browsers work. The brouhaha over transfers of satellite technology to China’s military goes beyond battles among intelligence and military agencies, and the behavior of U.S. companies. Understanding the story involves just what analyses of rocket behavior were lacking in China, which American firms were asked to provide.
The flood of interesting stories indicates that technology journalism is a good field to get into—for reporters with a special mix of education, insights, skills, and drives that is analogous to those of science reporters. But what is technology journalism? Is it coverage of new things that we can do which rapidly change people’s material condition? Johnstone puts it this way: “For me, it’s mostly how breakthroughs and improvements make it possible to meet existing needs better or to address previously unassailable needs.” Abate says, “Our paper has generally opted to enter [technology] stories through personality focus and product focus.” Lately, he finds, the greatest interest is in “three areas: gizmos, Internet community stuff, and e-commerce.” The audience “wants to know how they can use or buy the stuff.”
Technology stories focus heavily on business, according to Abate. Because of this, “my tech coverage has always…tended to be about profit and loss, winners and losers, as opposed to how things work.” Hence, “the vast preponderance of tech writers draw their paychecks—and marching orders—from the business [news] side of the house.” Advertising may influence the amount of coverage: “There are huge dollars to be gained by advertising such products, and that tends to drive hiring. Our paper has gone from three to eight tech people in two years.”
Many investors think that technology connotes hot stocks on NASDAQ, chiefly of companies dealing with chips and genes, or, if you prefer, silicon and DNA. Leaders of news organizations have a different focus: How will the new communications change the age range, sophistication, and size of their audiences?
Coverage of computers, communications, biotechnology, and medical
devices already is a vast industry in the mainstream press. It
looks even bigger if you consider the growing, constantly changing
hordes of specialized publications and Web sites.
To Jon Van, financial and practical usability is more prominent
in technology than in science stories. To be sure, one can, and
must, include a lot of science in the coverage, for example, of
the role of DNA chips in speeding laboratory analyses. Actual
use in labs “gave the perfect news peg to get editors interested.”
Van says that the DNA chips powerfully illustrate how technology
feeds back into science.
A year ago, the Tribune reported an all-out attack on
the concept of computer literacy from knowledgeable critics. The
basic finding was that computer makers intimidate people to accept
inferior usability. The critics wanted to “assure people
you’re OK. Machines are at fault, not you,” Van recalled.
An undercurrent is “technostress,” the difficulty of
coping with technology.
Van emphasizes technologies being applied in the Tribune
circulation area, and focuses on what consumers will want to know.
As he tested different wireless telephones just before the introduction
of a new service in Chicago, Van asked each of the consumer wireless
companies what the best deal was for 1) those who want wireless
but don’t expect to use it much, and 2) those expecting to
use it constantly.
A skeptical approach is necessary, as technology reporters juggle the contradictory functions of cheerleader, critic, or early-warning transmitter. Johnstone says the occupational hazards are “being suckered by p.r., getting carried away with enthusiasm and failing to remain properly skeptical, failing to maintain a proper sense of perspective…” Abate sees “enormous optimism and boosterism out there. Since so much of the news comes from companies, they are not likely to bestow the inside tip on the media or reporters who are most critical.”
Also counseling skepticism, Van says that if a big communications
equipment company is planning to buy another, he must dig out
the technological reason behind it. “Just looking at who
buys whom is only gossip.” Irradiation of meat, to lengthen
shelf life and cut risks to consumers, won regulatory approval.
But will it prove commercial? Locating the radiation source at
the meat-packing plant, to avoid the expense of transporting the
meat to a radiation facility, is itself costly. Is there a cheaper
alternative? Perhaps there is, Van found—(such as) steaming
the surface of the meat just before plunging it into deep cold.
Sources are a challenge. Johnstone says he gets many of his ideas
from technical journals—and from conferences. Van says the
same.
What is the audience? Johnstone says, “It’s difficult to know one’s readership. Typically, feedback only comes when you get something wrong. Lacking a sense of who it is I’m writing for, I have to confess that the most important reader for me is me—If I find something interesting, I figure that other people will, too.”
Victor McElheny, recently retired director of the Knight
Fellowship Program at MIT, spent five years as technology reporter
for The New York Times, the highlight of which, he recalls,
was covering the city-wide electricity blackout of 13 July 1977:
“I felt almost like a college student with an exam question:
‘New York City blacked out. Please explain!’ His biography,
Insisting on the Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, Father
of Instant Photography, was published in October 1998 by Perseus
Books.