Do we need another online tech news site? That’s an interesting question given the fact that the founder of Politico is about to announce another venture, Protocol, which is just that. The press release says that “Great media companies are sharply focused on communities and the ideas that bind them. POLITICO successfully captured the influential government and political communities. With Protocol, we aim to do the same with the world of technology.” Great goal, but is it possible, or are the skeptics who say that tech media is already a crowded space right?
We have dozens of tech publications today. Most of us probably use a half-dozen regularly and another dozen occasionally, often through news aggregators or references. That certainly fits the description of a “crowded space”, and so I think it would be fair to say that Protocol is doomed to failure if it turns out to be just another one of the typical online tech (virtual, of course) rags.
Politico, which I happen to read daily, was one of dozens of political publications when it launched. That proves that it’s not impossible to come late, as long as you do something that readers in your space aren’t getting enough of in those other, earlier, sources. What “somethings” might qualify in tech, might make Protocol viable? That has to start with what’s wrong in tech today, and for that, I have a combination of survey data and pretty significant and long-standing personal experience.
I wrote my first piece in a tech publication in 1982, on the then-dazzlingly-new topic of satellite communications. I’d given a talk on the topic at a trade show, and in the audience was an editor from the publication, who stopped me and asked me if I’d do an article. I did.
Almost as soon as the piece ran, I started to get calls from reporters and editors of other publications. Interestingly, few of them wanted something on satellite communications, but they apparently reasoned that if I knew that, I might know something else too. I got a lot of ink, and a lot of cynicism, from the experience, and it led to one of my pithy sayings, “An expert is someone who knows an editor.”
This is the start of the problem with tech media, which is that it’s a journalistic take on a non-journalistic topic. News, overall, is drawn from the collective experiences of our lives, which means not only that we can usually relate to it without major challenges of education, but also that those who write about it aren’t expected to have PhD’s in some arcane field. Tech isn’t like that.
Think, for a moment, about what would be involved in doing a hypothetical “Heisenberg” publication, an online site dedicated to news on quantum theory. We have two choices; we do quantum-for-dummies, in which case none of the people who really need or care about quantum theory developments will read it. Or we do quantum-for-the-quantized, in which case the number of people who can read it, or more important, can produce it, will be vanishingly small.
We used to do the latter in tech. In the early ‘80s, at the time I did my first article, my surveys of IT and network buyers said that there were about fourteen thousand organized points of purchase in the networking space. The number of subscribers to the best of the network technology rags ran about the same. By 1989, we’d increased the number of organized points of purchase to just about sixteen thousand, but ad sponsored reader-service-driven processes had increased the subscribers to network rags by an order of magnitude. Who were all these other people? Network dilettantes, relative amateurs. As a result, we dumbed down network and tech coverage.
The result of this was a significant drop in the influence tech media has on buyers. Back in 1983, it was the second-most-powerful strategic influence on technology buyers, after experiences of a trusted peer. By 1989 it had fallen to fifth, and in my 2017 survey it ranked seventh. The problem is that these are news sites, news targeted to the “average” reader, who isn’t one of those critical decision-makers at all.
News coverage, meaning sites focused on specific news, have an inherent problem of shallowness. Press releases are always shallow. When something new is dug up, there’s almost always a race to “scoop” rivals, which doesn’t contribute to careful analysis. However, news coverage is essential because it’s what keeps people looking at the site regularly, and because carefully analyzed news is a potential hook to deeper analysis. The challenge is having that analysis to link to, and that means putting news in a context that supports its linkage with other stories.
That’s what Protocol has to deal with. Most of all, tech news today lacks context. It’s not fed by relevant developments, it’s manipulated by vendors. To be useful to buyers, tech stories would have to be collected around a series of actionable trends, related to each other and to the buying decision that was actually on the table. In networking, in the cloud, we’re not going to get to the next level by taking random dance steps in the dark. We need to know where we’re going.
It’s pretty obvious what general political news is important, and for any given country, the political context isn’t something that takes a rocket scientist to figure out. Look at the US, the UK, the EU, China, or Japan today and you can see what I mean. In tech, though, national boundaries don’t matter as much as technology boundaries. We have chips, servers, software, networks. In each of those we have a context, but how many people could say what the world view of any of those areas would look like? Without a world view, how could a relevant context be established to guide editors/reporters to the topics that are really important?
Context is a first step, but guidance is the second. “I don’t want decision support, I want to be told what to do!” is my favorite client quote. We need to fill a need, and the primary need is for actionable insight. That means something more than a 500-word glitter-and-buzzword piece on an architectural innovation that might have required a million hours of labor to generate, and will require thousands of hours of tech labor to adopt. Every story can’t create insight, but every story that’s contextualized can draw a roadmap to insightful follow-up.
Politico has both “news” and a “magazine” section that delivers stories in considerable depth. That’s the solution to the actionable insight part, providing that the stories in Protocol are written by somebody who actually has some insights to share. With a space as broad as tech, and one that’s already bewilderingly complex and getting more so literally by the day, that’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible.
The tech industry has been hurt—financially, educationally, culturally—by the lack of tools to give buyers the information they need to make confident decisions and then implement them. Those tools aren’t just notifications of announcements or happenings. Protocol could take political-news know-how and try to butt its way into the crowded space. If they succeed, they might gain something, but the market would gain nothing. Or they could do this right, in which case they’d not only become a beacon in the space, they might build a mighty tech market. I say, “Good luck to you!”