“Truth-be-damned”

I guess it is that time of the month when a mainstream media journalist takes a shot at a prominent blog. This time it is Damon Darlin of NYT who manages to get Mike Arrington of TechCrunch and Brian Lam of Gizmodo to admit they write,  “thinly sourced stories”.

The popularity of many tech blogs is not because they follow juicy details of Steve Jobs’ health or the latest rumor on Twitter, but because they have the bandwidth, the capability and the interest to cover a wide range of products in their areas of focus – gadgets, games, enterprise software.  Media just cannot compete.

Particularly, when it comes to enterprise technology, the Times sitting right next to the biggest corporate HQs in the world which spend trillions on enterprise technology should be all over that but instead does a piss-poor job of coverage as I wrote here. And it goes downhill from there when you look at coverage in smaller, regional papers.

Compared to what media carries, I would say many blogs are “richly sourced” on a wide range of tech topics.

Also, last time I checked Janet Cooke and Jayson Blair were writing “thinly sourced stories” for mainstream media way before blogs became popular.

But what the heck, let truth be damned…