There is an air of optimism pervading the technology business. This growing confidence has been bolstered by recent good results from the big players such as Intel and IDC yesterday forecast 5% growth in IT spending.
So when will this new found momentum affect the technology media? Not for a while it seems. The technology magazines were hit hard by the downturn and their masssive staff expansions required savage job cuts and mayhem. As a result I think magazine management are going to be very slow to rebuild trade magazines until the business is actually booming, which for the PR business translates into stressed, over worked journalists.
Mark Glaser at the Online Journalism Review has a very insightful interview with Jai Singh, founding editor at CNET’s News.com – a bellweather of the pre- and post-Internet boom.
In response to a question on the return of the technology business, Singh comments:
“Definitely, from a year ago and two years ago and three years ago. It appears to be getting better. The bosses haven’t given me carte blanche and said, “Go, hire away!”
He also has some interesting and honest views on blogs:
“We literally have a daily discussion on this topic. We have a lot of top people writing columns and perspectives but we know that the bulk of our readership still comes to us for the news. In one sense, my editor for opinions, Charles Cooper, writes a column that’s sort of a blog, and we have this “Your Take” feature now, whereby readers can respond to his column, but it is not a two-way thing. I think with news the question is which blogger do you really trust. There are so many of them. It seems to me like it’s a pretty incestuous thing going on. One journalist points to another journalist’s blog and other bloggers point to other people’s blogs, and you somehow think that this is the most popular thing. But is it credible? I don’t know.”
The full interview is here and is definetely worth a read.
Murphy's Law 