How The Press Got Caught Up In The Bubble Hype
from the it-was-too-easy dept
It seems that we still haven’t gotten past the phase of discussing just who was to blame for the dot com bubble. SF Gate is running an article looking at how various reporters got sucked up into the hype without even the slightest bit of critical reporting. It was a combination of untrained reporters thrown into business reporting because there were so many damn pages to fill (in between all that lucrative advertising) mixed with a general culture and desire from readers to only read upbeat articles. Magazines that published critical pieces got hammered by angry readers. The demand for more content made magazines hire reporters who had no business knowledge and send them out to write glowing stories – so they simply bought into the hype themselves and republished it as articles. Of course, nowadays, it’s almost the opposite. Anyone who writes a positive piece about a tech company seems to get hammered. It’s much more fun to kick tech companies while they’re down, it seems.
