Saturday July 02, 2005 British Journalism Redux
I'm just on my way home from JavaOne and I notice that Ingrid Marson has done her bit to sustain the low standard of "reporting" by UK hacks in her story Sun 'distorts' definition of free software on ZDNet UK News. Ingrid has chosen to pick up a rhetorical device delivered in the context of a long, positive keynote about freedom and sharing rather than describe the actual spirit of either the keynote or indeed the news at hand (where Sun has open sourced another huge and crucial part of its software portfolio under a real OSI-approved open source license in a real, public community).
She didn't show up for her interview with me*, even after rescheduling it, where she would have been able to find out about Sun's actual position on open source rather than having to refer to Slashdot for comments from parties at least as biased as me and considerably less informed on the actual facts. Neither did she comment, even in her article about whether Java developers want open source, on Sun open sourcing it's Java EE application server. In that article she also preferred to recycle out-of-date comments from IBM rather than report on the rapprochement between Sun and IBM. Does she have an axe to grind? I hope so because the other diagnoses are much less charitable. [You can read all her JavaOne coverage - 4 stories - and be the judge: Real Time Java; Schwartz on "Free"; Java and open source; JavaOne News roundup (notice anything missing?)]
Is there a decent journalist working anywhere in the UK tech press any more? Getting comment from alternate voices is a valid device. Reporting via vox populi can sometimes be interesting. But when so-called "reporters" combine the two in a spirit of cynicism and fail to report the actual new news despite copious opportunity you know that 'journalism' has left the building.
* Update 6 July: Word reaches my ears by a circuitous route that Ingrid is upset that her integrity has been maligned - she apparently cancelled the second meeting because it clashed with the flight home booked for her by Sun UK - had I known I would have pointed that out. I also gather she did not use Slashdot to gather comments. My apologies to her.
Oh, and Matt & Ingrid, feel free to leave comments here too, no need to go through official channels - these are my personal views after all.
Posted by webmink
( Jul 02 2005, 03:32:57 AM PDT )
Permalink
Comments [2]
