Amrit Williams, BigFix CTO, discusses the current state of tech journalism and how we receive information with Mike Vizard, editor of CTO Edge.

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Amrit Williams: Welcome! This is Beyond the Perimeter. I am your host, Amrit Williams. Today I am joined by Mike Vizard, and Mike is Editor of CTO Edge and Blogger with IT Business Edge. He has been in tech journalism for over 20 plus years. Mike, thanks for joining me today.

Mike Vizard: My pleasure.

Amrit Williams: Mike, one of the things that I was thinking about is, we have seen this change in how media and journalism, the mediums that they use to gather information and communicate information, and there is always this ongoing debate about tech media versus online. I wanted to just sort of get your thoughts on the benefits and the negatives of this progression. Has it impacted quality? Has it improved delivery of speed, and those type of things? So just someone who has been dealing with the tech industry for quite some time, what’s here, what do you think about this change of journalism moving towards more technology?

Mike Vizard: Well, I think the benefits as a whole outweigh the negatives. The benefits are, if you think back in time when it was just — print media was kind of like covering a town, and the only thing you ever heard from were the people who ran the town and the businesses in the town, but there was no coverage of what the people in the town were doing, because it was just too hard to kind of get that kind of coverage. Where you get a lot of one-off interviews and case studies, but you couldn’t get a collective kind of mindset as you can today with the nature of the web and the nature of all these different mediums that are out there.

The news of the day or the happenings of the day are just as likely, if not more likely, nowadays to come out of the user community than they are to come from the vendors. So it has really changed the nature of the conversation, the nature of discussion. You see a lot of people, who have a lot of technical expertise, stepping up to become quasi-journalists, or they are definitely becoming media sources and opinion makers and columnists. That to me creates a richer fabric for a bigger conversation.

The only downside I can see is that a lot of times you will see some crowd mentality, or crowdsourcing as some people call it, around a negative idea, or some bad information will flow through the “system” at a rapid rate, and it takes a long time to kind of readjust that. But that’s always been there in one degree or another, I think it just gets magnified now in these formats.

So by and large, I would still say that the positives outweigh the negatives, and whatever negatives there are, they were there before, they are just — more people are aware of them.

Amrit Williams: Oh definitely. The experience of being able to leverage such a wide set of thoughts, and people, and information sources is fantastic, and the speed at what you can get access to that data is phenomenal.

But I wanted to ask you, do you think that there — I mean, you seem to think that there is not much difference in terms of the type of integrity of the data, it’s just amplified in terms of how it’s being used and spread. Have you got a sense that any of the quality of the type of data that’s being leveraged and sent out because of the speed dynamic is dramatically different, or is it just a little bit different?

I will give you a case in point. Last year we had a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks that took down some South Korean websites and some U.S. government websites, and everyone was quick to blame North Korea. It turned out North Korea wasn’t involved. But even today you still see that information spreading around that North Korea committed these cyber attacks against South Korea and some other nations.

It seems like that information, once seen online, everyone just sort of accepts that somebody had validated it, but it seems like the process of validating the data and ensuring that it’s accurate is not as intensive as it has been in the past. I could be wrong about the cost part.

Mike Vizard: I think the time factor is there, and more people get exposed to it faster, but the bad information falling through the “media system” is always been there.

I mean, how many guys shot Kennedy in Dallas? There was no Internet back then, and we still had the same issues. So I still think, we are always going to have bad information flowing around. I would say one thing about the Internet is that, in the same way that there is peer review of open source code, there is more peer review of bad stories, and you get more of a response, so that there is a better chance for the right information to eventually overcome the bad information that it might have been 10 years or 20 years ago.

Amrit Williams: What type of changes do you think will you expect to happen over the next ten years in terms of how we share media today?

Mike Vizard: Oh, it will definitely be a lot more video-centric and a lot more conversational. I think you will see smaller and smaller groups of people being able to come together to pursue a particular interest or a particular topic.

So I think you will see media outlets start to get narrower and narrower and more focused and focused. They will still be big media outlets, but there will be much more smaller community-driven topic areas, whether that’s around something in my local community, or my particular technology interest, you could, for example, see something that might be called desktopvirtualizationtimes.com, and it’s going to have a whole set of following around the whole issue of desktop virtualization.

It wouldn’t have been practical and cost-effective to pursue that level of topic at that narrower level in previous generations of technology, I think as the cost of the technology drops, it becomes much more cost-effective to have much more tighter and narrower bands of communities.

Amrit Williams: Well, it sounds like we can get broader exposure to information, and we can also get much deeper exposure to information that we may not have been able to seen in the past.

Mike Vizard: I think that’s about the size of it. I think broader is not so much as broad as you think it is, because a lot of times what you are seeing is, patterns in the web and search engines in particular today don’t lend themselves to what I call accidental discovery. You are pretty much getting inundated with the same news from Google and the same news from Yahoo! and the same news from everybody else. So you are getting hit 50 times a day with the same story.

So I think we are getting broader to a degree, but I think over time we are going to get much more narrower, and that will be the richer part of the experience.

Amrit Williams: Do you think there’s been an acceptance now of online media, in terms of mediums like blogging or podcasting? I know in the past it was looked at as sort of, something off to the side. Have you been seen it become more mainstream and more accepted?

Mike Vizard: Yeah, I think it’s definitely become more mainstream and more accepted. It still has an age factor to it and a topic area factor. I think we in technology are much more in tune with it than say people who are, not to denigrate the dairy industry, but I suspect the dairy industry might not be quite as far along here.

Then the other side of thing though that I would just caution people about is, there is this crowd mentality that’s starting to take hold, and you are seeing people who are in the media, whether they are small or large, all cover the same topics because they are chasing page views. The end result is a thousand stories about the same thing. And that cannot end up being the healthiest way of thinking about how we are going to use this wonderful new tool, when everybody is just chasing a page view and a search engine click. Page view journalism can be just as bad as pack journalism.

Amrit Williams: I have been a lot of times in the media and I have seen lots of people, they seem to move around a lot, and I don’t know if this is a taboo question for folks in journalism, but is this something that’s new, or is this always been the case?

I mean, I have a lot of friends, they cover tech, and I don’t know if it’s a tech-specific type of thing, but it seems like every time I turn around, they are representing some other outlet, or they are working for some other company. Is this because there is more freelancing going on, or is that just the nature of the industry?

Mike Vizard: Well, there is two big factors at work there. There is a lot of older media companies with legacy business models that they are trying to pull through and make a transition to the Internet with. That winds up with them constantly restructuring their staffs. The end result of that is, it puts a lot more talent out there and makes it available for a broader array of startups. So you are seeing some diffusion of the talent.

Then the second thing you are also seeing is, there is also a lot of ability to move within the tech space, because a lot of it is knowledge-driven, and people are not tied to the brand of the media company anymore, they are tied to their own brands. So you see a lot of tech journalists who are having their own brand, and as such they have a lot of mobility that goes with that, because they are not tied to being a writer for The New York Times, they are not tied to being a writer for any particular tech publication, they have their own brand and their own policy.

Amrit Williams: Do you think that journalism in general — I mean, is there still that strong desire to get into journalism, the way that it seemed like it used to be when you have the stories being cracked like Watergate, is there that same drive? I don’t know if you have any connections to some of the folks that are young and coming up through the ranks. Do you get that same sense of investigative journalism that people want to pursue, or do you see a new type of role coming through?

Mike Vizard: Right now it feels like to me it’s much more driven by people’s individual passions than it is calling to investigative journalism that you have seen out there. There’s still a big need for that, and there’s still a big role for it, but until we get some sort of next major scandal, you won’t see that level of people coming out of college with the sense of righteousness that they might have had when they came out of college in the 70s and early 80s.

I think you are seeing that younger generation is much more into the community aspects, and a particular passion they have for a give topic than it is for exposés. If they can expose something and trip over it, they will halfway do it, but they are not getting out of bed in the morning, and that’s not the first thing on their mind.

Amrit Williams: Trying to chase down that next big story. It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays off. I know for me it’s been interesting to watch the progression of the way we share information, and the way information is created and distributed throughout the world over the last couple of decades, the last decade specifically.

The way that people get exposed information, the way you watch information travel around the Internet, and who picks it up and runs with it, is pretty interesting, especially when you see stuff come through new types of media sources, like you see somebody blog something, and then it shows up in traditional print. That’s been a very interesting transition, but we will see how this progresses.

I agree with you though, I think the benefits certainly appear to be outweighing any of the negatives. Hopefully we can crack down on some of the more cut-and-paste type of stories that I also see running rampant, especially when the cut-and-pasting is of inaccurate information.

Mike Vizard: There is a phenomenal amount of cutting-and-pasting right now, and a lot of that is just driven by sites that are set up specifically to drive a page view, hoping somebody will register, and then they become part of somebody’s campaign.

I think over time people will get wise to that, and they will figure out what outlets are viable, and which outlets are kind of just there to kind of create a marketing engine.

Amrit Williams: I know even with my own blog, I have seen my stories show up on someone else’s site, where the attribution to me is in really, really small font, off to the right somewhere, and there is no link back to the original source. Some of these sites are located in some Middle Eastern country or Russia or something, so it’s very difficult to keep in touch with them.

Mike Vizard: Yeah, there will be a lot of that. I mean, links are kind of like corner in the room, and it’s kind of how you cite people bank and forth. Even if you don’t specifically identify the person in the article, you are at least incumbent upon it to link to the original source of whatever it is you are citing. But I just wonder, I am not sure if we are teaching link etiquette on the web or even in journalism schools just yet, but I am sure we will get there.

Amrit Williams: I certainly hope so. Well Mike, I really appreciate you joining me today. I definitely would like to talk with you some more in the future and get your thoughts. If folks want to read some of your work, they can find you at CTO Edge, is that CTOEdge.com?

Mike Vizard: CTOEdge.com, and you can find, the blog is on ITBusinessEdge.com, or ITBE.com.

Amrit Williams: Perfect! I really appreciate you joining me Mike, thanks very much.

Announcer: You have just listened to Beyond the Perimeter, sponsored by BigFix Inc. Views expressed on this Podcast are the personal opinions of Podcast participants and do not reflect official positions of their employers or BigFix.

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