The hypocritical churnalist

Ah, the Path incident. The actual incident (sending your address book without you knowing) was soon forgotten. The Path incident turned into a tech-journalism incident. The apparent lack of research in the original article (which I won’t link to) caused many people to point out the problems with “churnalism”, i.e. getting the story out as fast as possible and moving on to the next one, in the technology sector. Ironically by people who did or do the same thing, which triggered even more people to chip in with their opinion.

Truth be told, I like the current discussion about journalism-turned-churnalism. The later is IMHO the main reason for the problems in the news industry as a whole. And there is my main concern: the discussion is way too focused on the technology sector. It is a general problem though. Personally, I applaud the hypocritical churnalist and hopefully it will spread beyond tech-journalism. It might start a discussion that should have started a long time ago. If we move away from the current state of rumor and hearsay reporting to actual reporting, everyone will be better off.