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Bloggers and The Trade Journal Herd

I was sick this weekend so I holed up and read through about 50 IT trade magazines to get a sense of what's going on. After ten magazines I found I could skim an entire magazine in less than 10 minutes. They all seem to be working under the same editorial control, even if they are in separate publishing companies.

If editors and journalists are going to complain about how bloggers all act to amplify the same small set of stories over and over again, then these same professionals should stop doing the exact same thing. I read several of these sorts of references, along with the same stories over and over. For example, I've read the following quote by Winston Churchill five times:

"Now is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Why is it suddenly so popular? On to the topics I pulled out of all these magazines. Primarily lots of PR about new product releases, and upgrades, sales and mergers, and executives moving from one place to another. The "real" stories were mostly shallow like about how Sarbanes-Oxley is a challenge. No insights on IT contribution to helping Sarbox at all. Big raft of articles on IT and healthcare, mostly due to the push for online medical records. Nothing substantial found.

Lots of small articles on Open Source and grid, with a few "what's new" items. The only useful piece of information on that topic was the management turnover and lawsuits as the Canopy Group. Expect customer lawsuits by SCO to fade away. Maybe the whole issue will disappear. It should have long ago with the complete pillaging of SCO shareholders but didn't.

Last was a bunch of pieces on "why projects fail" with mostly common sense quotes. These are all apparently driven by the latest big $170M fiasco at the FBI. I find it depressing when I think about how little impact the Software Engineering Institute has had over the past decade.

That's it. Four main topics, one quote, a raft of corporate PR. In 50 magazines. This is why I read trades so seldom and focus on technical and management journals.

Posted by Mark Sunday, January 30, 2005 5:05:00 PM | permalink |

Comments:

Mark - nice article.

Just trying to touch base - did you recieve my emails yesterday? Seems like they're not going through.

Tim
ITtoolbox Blogs

# posted by  Anonymous : 11:56 AM

 

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