It’s an honest retrospection from a tech writer M.G. Siegler (aka Paris Lemon). He said that most of today’s technology articles (either written by bloggers or traditional journalists) are “bullshit”, blaming pageviews and paychecks behind this.
- We have bloggers who sometimes are deeply embedded in the technology community and have quite a bit of insight and understanding about one or two companies/topics. But they have to write 4 or 5 or 6 or more stories a day as quickly as possible to feed the pageview beast.
- We have more traditional journalists who are not deeply embedded in the technology community in any way and/or are forced to write for a more mainstream audience and end up writing obscenely bland stories about technology that only a brain-dead geriatric could love.
Dear fellow bloggers: if you wanted to write a piece on technology, but don’t have enough data or numbers; don’t have robust insight that you could offer; don’t get the “big picture” of the industry you would like to cover; or don’t have a very cool stuff with you on that particular topic, just change the tone. Just simply write a personal voice. Yeah, a personal experience (even it’s a subjective opinion though) won’t lead you to the same problem.
Off course, every writer needs readerships, pageview, traffic and so on. But trust and credibility should be your top priority.
Create trust first, pageview –and yeah, money, as well– will follow.