Should tech journalists be good at tech?

One of the big questions of 2017 was "Should game journalists be good at games?". A result of some guy struggling to get passed the tutorial of Cuphead, getting cagey about it and having the gaming media come to his defense by insinuating that games are too hard and that you shouldn't be good at them in order to properly cover them. The whole argument was stupid and could have bine sidestepped by just saying something along the lines of "Whoops", instead of doubling down on digging a deeper hole.

But since we're in that neighborhood, here's a new question. Should tech journalists be good at tech?

There are two answers. The people working in tech and the people wanting to read about tech will say yes. It's necessary. If not, false information will be spread. But if you were to ask the people actually working in the field, they would... well, they would probably also say yes, but actually mean no. You may not know this, but a lot of people working in the internet press aren't really journalists. And I don't mean tech journalists, I mean actual journalists. I'm not one, yet I've been working as an imitation of one for years. I sort of slid into writing news because a forum I was a member of a decade ago posted an announcement for the community to pitch in with writing articles. So that's how I got into this and because I did the bare minimum, I kept getting more into it and applauded for it. For the bare minimum. That is honestly frightening, when the bare minimum is lauded. Even when was disgruntled and was on the brink of quitting, last year, doing the bare minimum got me a raise. Now, I mention this because there are a lot of other people in internet journalism, be it tech or gaming, that also got into it in a similar way. With no formal training, no journalism degree. I did do an on-line course that implied actually making a first issue of a magazine alongside a team, so that we'd learn how things go. Like I said, the bare minimum. And because I'm not really a tech journalists, I do make the odd mistake. I once confused Java with JavaScript, though, to be fair, I was recovering from surgery then and was still trying to figure out how to digest food with an incomplete digestive system. But I also confused an Arduino with an Edison, for which I have no excuse. 

However, I still shudder when I see what passes for tech journalism in more reputable sites, that you'd think would do a better job of hiring people that actually have training in the field. And it's not something relegated to internet journalism, that actually seems to have a tiny bit of a leg up over regular journalism, articles in papers and TV about technology being so monumentally misinformed that I wish I could slap people with a trout through the screen. One of the best examples of this I can remember in recent years was form the British television show The Gadget Show, which, you know, you would think would understand technology. That show declared the desktop PC dead, offering reasons like "you can preview photos on a tablet, so you don't even need a laptop now". 

It was made in that wonderful age when tablet PCs were touted by the press as the next big thing. When we were being ushered into the Post-PC world. Fast forward two years and tablets are now dead, desktops are going strong and laptops have killed the tablet.  And you tended to see a lot of these because they're made by people that don't really use tech in their day to day lives. Sure, they have a phone and may write something on a laptop, but they're preaching about things they have no contact with. How am I going to link three monitors to a tablet and do video editing on it in 2014? That's a scenario of a work space that wouldn't have even crossed the minds of these people, because it doesn't fit in their narrow view of what tech is. To them, tech is an umbrela stand that tells you if its raining outside, or a water bottle that tells you to drink water because the human body sure doesn't have a function for that. Nope, sure doesn't, that's why we all died of dehydration a million years ago.

It's very easy to see the lack of understanding present in the tech press whenever articles that predict the future show up. Articles like the one below: 

http://www.thisisinsider.com/things-that-will-no-longer-exist-2017-11

Now, to be fair, there are a few that absolutely make sense, the lower-end compact camera market being killed by smartphones is 100% true. But if you look closely, the reasoning for some of them are utterly mad. Hard Drives going away because of cloud computing? Really? That's the same as The Gadget Show saying something similar because a 1000$ 1TB USB stick was released. What does the author believe that cloud computing uses? I'll give you a hint, it still won't be high capacity SSDs for at least 5 more years, because their price is still huge and supplies are short. So spinning rust is still the go to solution for storage. Then there's things like paper maps going away because we have Google Maps, which is so very useful when you're not in an area with internet coverage. But still, that's about as benign as it can get. It's a filler pieces you'd write at the end of the year when no actual content is out there. 

The incompetence in tech journalism can actually be damaging, spreading false information about what Bitcoin is, about what the deep web is, about how the internet works. Disseminating FUD, fear uncertainty and doubt about technologies they don't understand but still claim to have detailed knowledge of. It gets to the point where shoddy tech journalism is being used to outright swindle people out of their money. There was an Indiegogo campaign not long ago for a fake product called the Triton underwather breathing device, that used liquid oxygen and some fancy unheard of battery to let you breath underwater. And you'd see it being parroted on all sorts of tech sites you'd think would have a bit more of a filter for bullcrap. To prove this thing worked, they had a guy stand for about 12 minutes under water, breathing through it, never turning his head to the left, in case you'd notice the air hose or the tank behind him.

And then there's utter disasters like Solar Roadways that everyone was touting as the text big thing, throwing money at it by the millions, shoving it in everyone's face as the future, as the way forward, and anyone criticizing it as being bought off by the oil industry. Even though, you know, putting a solar panel flat on a road or on the pavement of a parking lot is the worst place to put them. Not to mention there being so many problems with what happens when a 12 ton truck makes a sudden break on glass. And yet, without an actual proof of the concept working, without any sort of testing, without even taking a moment to ask someone that knows how solar panels work, the media was in love with this and encouraged people to spend money on it. And when the cracks started showing and people were pointing out that it was a dumb idea, you'd get replies like "well, I don't see you doing anything to save the environment, at least they're trying". No, they're not trying, it's a scam. 

Then we had the whole "hoverboard" fiasco and so many stupid, stupid ideas that should have been filtered out if only there part of the internet media, and general media too, that covers technology was actually filled with people that understand technology, not just someone that can write or look pretty on camera. Or if you're still going to keep those people around, at least insist on them doing the bare minimum of work. That means actually understanding what they're talking about, not copy and pasting something from Wikipedia, not parroting a press release, not taking some snake oil salesman at his or her word.  And then it's the same media that goes on to complain about how Facebook is causing the Fake News epidemic, ignoring what the source of that Fake News is in the first place.