When you cover a beat, a lot of times there are small stories that are worthy of a few paragraphs. But you often come across those stories while researching your beat and working on longer articles. So it often makes sense to divide up resources (the time of writers) based on topic rather than story length.
Either you work for PandoDaily or this is a very elaborate tongue-in-cheek comment. I'm certain you're the first and last person to ever say "Pando is to tech, what The Economist is to business, or The New Yorker is to culture."
It's just a spinoff of TechCrunch in both its origins and content. It's like the Joanie Loves Chachi to Happy Days.
That's true. There was a time when it wasn't easy for regular folks to find press releases and announcements, so there were all these magazines marketed to IT pros and tech executives that just regurgitated marketing materials, and that could be perceived as being a valuable service.
Of course, some of the websites still do that :-) But you really need to add original reporting or analysis today to stand out.
I'm a tech journalist (for Ars Technica) so I figured I'd weigh in. First of all, I totally agree that there is tons and tons of awful tech journalism, and I regularly make fun of it. But I don't think all of these examples are quite so terrible.
The Wired story has some interesting comments from a very important person in the tech world. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it seems fine to me.
I'm not a TechCrunch fan, but this particular story relays some interesting information that people might not have read if they read TechCrunch instead of TorrentFreak. I've quoted TorrentFreak in some of my own stories, it's often a good source. There are so many worse examples from TechCrunch that could be used to make the case against tech journalism, but I'll just point out one: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/24/the-lyft-launch-that-coulda...
Agreed on the BI and Mashable examples. Funnily enough, the Mashable one could have been good if it showed the actual evolution of Windows user interfaces rather than stupid illustrations of people sitting at desks.
If anyone wants a great parody of awful tech journalism, I suggest following this person on Twitter (I especially love the picture, which is a parody of the guy who started Mashable): https://twitter.com/nexttechblog
Any update from Iranian users on the current situation? Are the blockages still in force? I covered this issue for Ars Technica on Friday: http://arst.ch/sg1 and would like to be able to provide an update. Thanks.