The high-tech media food chain

How the computer trade press paves the vaporware trail

By Doug Fine

  • Pages 1 2

Apr 22, 1996 | My neck hurts. My modem won't connect. Somewhere in the non-dimensional, quark-sized bowels of cyberspace, I just lost a story that was due yesterday, and I've been on hold with Microsoft's decidedly not toll-free "support" line, on and off, for several months.

I feel like a cybergeek version of Michael Douglas' character in "Falling Down." I have no control over my life.

Where, I might ask, is the individual empowerment the Digital Era promised? (I'm sure someone had promised me this.) How do all these semi-compatible, not-ready-for-prime-time, almost-functional products make it to market?

But I know the answer already. I worked for a year in the computer trade press -- and still write for it when financially necessary.

Go to the Source

In 1977 Ed Pettit wrote a book called The Experts, more than 400 pages of official sources stating, on the record, deliberate or ignorant untruths about the situation in Vietnam between 1957 and 1975. I read the book after my stint at InfoWorld, and felt eerie shocks of recognition. In the trade press, as in "official source" quotes from the Pentagon during wartime, certain authorities -- and every new reporter learns very quickly who they are -- can be counted on to say certain things at deadline time.

Publications of repute, such as InfoWorld (a weekly with a 310,000 circulation), have an admirable three-source rule. The problem is, too often, all these sources are ignorant fools bucking for press, evangelists with an interest in a certain model or product, or just, as in the case of Pettit's book, misguided and overpaid "experts."

Recent Stories

Ask the pilot
Propped up by a culture of fear, TSA has become a bureaucracy with too much power and little accountability. Where will the lunacy stop?
Ask the pilot
Flying isn't much fun, but for now people keep doing it anyway. What can the airlines do to keep their customers happy?
Slick John McCain and the offshore oil ruse
The safety and economics of offshore drilling are distractions from the much larger challenges that humanity faces: Climate change and peak oil.
Ask the pilot
The smell of smoke in the cockpit, and it's back to Boston for a planeload of fixated Japanese tourists.
Ask the pilot
When a routine flight is plunged into weirdness after the crew smells smoke, how to deal with a possible emergency -- and a plane full of foreign tourists.

Daily Newsletter

Get Salon in your mailbox!