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Why Tech (&) Media is complicated
After I published my “velocity is the new authority” essay, a reader and dear friend emailed and asked if my framework explained the fraught relationship between media and the technology ecosystem it covers. My one-word reply was “Absolutely.” And here’s why.
In “comms” across tech, startups, and the larger ecosystem, little seems to matter anymore. It’s hard to pin down anythingconcrete or meaningful. Everything is noise and nothing can be heard.
Most founders (and technology companies) treat comms like a checklist: have something new, draft a story, chase press,issue a release, share it on LinkedIn and X, maybe do a podcast tour. Others skip intermediaries and go straight to their audience. That worked when media was the gatekeeper and friction was high. Building your audience and owning your channels made sense. Today, anyone can go direct, and the noise has exploded. Rising above it gets harder every day.
Velocity is replacing authority as the organizing principle for information. You see it in the broken relationship between media and the technology ecosystem. The YouTube tech review I wrote about earlier highlights the core issue: access.
Access journalism is as old as media itself. These days though, it is table stakes. Not just in tech, but across all media. I didn’t play the access game, so I was not a preferred “leaker” for many technology companies. I got my stories the old-fashioned way. By being an annoying scoop hunter. It didn’t pan out often, but occasionally I got the big one. Like Microsoft buying Skype. It was a hard game to play. It’s even harder now.
A few months ago, I naively asked the founder of a purportedly disruptive company for an interview. I thought it would be a great interview, as he was doing something new and interesting and worth digging into. Obviously, he didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. Maybe he was worried that an old-school reporter like me would do my homework and ask basic, but tough questions. The kind of questions that used to be standard fare, but now they get you ignored.
A hundred years ago, tabloids printed whatever they were told, just to sell rags. Today it’s videos and podcasts. Don’t get me started on the “technology” ones, especially those creaming over “AI.”
Podcasters need guests. To build an audience they chase boldface names. Access depends on avoiding tough questions. Press them with unflattering ones and you get a reputation. No surprise we now have podcasters acting as mouthpieces for tech companies. The “interview” becomes a promotional vehicle. The host lobs softballs and nods along with whatever narrative the guest is spinning. Both lapse into MBA-speak. It’s an Oscar-worthy performance. The line between journalism and marketing blurs.
I don’t think this is an ethical failure; it’s structural. When your business model depends on downloads and views, you do what you must: keep cozy relationships with a small circle of founders, venture capitalists, and executives you’re supposed to cover critically.
AI podcasts are a perfect example. You hear the same talking heads saying the same things. They’re half-bullish, half-skeptical. One side sees transformation, the other disaster. As with any technology, the truth sits somewhere in the middle. What you need is contextual skepticism, technical scrutiny, and analytic rigor. That mix doesn’t exist because the system won’t support it.
There are fewer than a dozen journalists I can name-check those who don’t disappoint. Nilay Patel of The Verge for example. There are some veterans, but only a handful are newcomers. Good technology coverage needs more.
While building GigaOm, I knew we’d drown in pitch meetings without standards. I wrote a one-page guide for my writers covering startups. Beyond taking the time to understand their subject, I asked them to answer four questions before writing about a founder or a startup.
Begin with the founders. Look past LinkedIn summaries to their actual histories. Have they built and shipped real products? Do they understand the market they claim to disrupt? Are they domain experts or opportunists chasing the latest trend? And lastly, as a form of validation, who are their financial backers?
Founders were interesting only if you had enough context about the technology landscape to distinguish the novel from the incremental. You had to know whether their insight was real or just a repackaging of existing ideas with better marketing.
Investors mattered. With every deal, a firm put its reputation on the line. Their involvement signaled intent. If Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins backed a company, it meant their partners had done due diligence. The amount of capital and the stage said a lot about conviction and risk tolerance.
Assessing the market opportunity amid technology trends was the hardest part and required the most expertise. You needed to understand what was technically possible,, what the market was ready for, how the cost curves looked, andwhere the ecosystem dependencies were.
All this took time. I spent years watching markets evolve, covering hundreds of companies, and seeing patterns emerge. My understanding of technology grew through conversations with people who built it. Tony Li and Pradeep Sindhu walked me through the secrets of internet routing. From Andy Bechtolsheim and Desh Deshpande, I learned the ins and outs of switching. David Huber, the man behind Ciena, introduced me to optical networks. I learned the technology and, in turn, how to ask the right questions.
I was lucky. Back then, the internet didn’t move at neck-snapping speed.
In my VC role, I told founders to step back and think about why their stories mattered to anyone but themselves. I encouraged them to build real rather than transactional relationships with journalists, and to wait until they had something genuinely interesting to say instead of treating PR as a checklist.
It was good advice then, and it still is, in part, as a subset of a new approach. The system I described, where thoughtful storytelling and relationship-building mattered, required time on both sides.
Much like the rest of media, tech journalism, today relies on writers who lack the deep context to do the work well. They are young, overworked, pushed to churn, and don’t have time to spend weeks learning a market before covering it. You can’t learn on the job while filing three stories a day or recording several podcast episodes a month.
As I argued in my velocity piece, we now operate on vibes. When a firm like Andreessen Horowitz invests in everything at every stage, what does that signal? A16z’s backing no longer means what Sequoia’s meant in 2005, and a TechCrunch launch no longer means what it did in 2008. The technology ecosystem is noise. Its media outlets are just the outward expression of that noise.
I just read a Bloomberg piece about a startup called Upscale, which claimed it would take on Cisco and Broadcom with AI networking gear. It has raised a truckload of money and is valued in the billions, yet the story never told me the mostbasic thing: what it actually does.
The Wall Street Journal, the bastion of good financial journalism, recently spent many inches on the peccadillos of one of the founders of Thinking Machines. Thinking Machines is an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees and is now valued at $12 billion. The WSJ and a handful of other major publications covered this drama as if it were a story for the Daily Mail or Vanity Fair, yet none of them explained to readers what Thinking Machines does or why it is worth $12 billion. What is its technological edge? You know, the basic financial and technological questions most readers need forcontext.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen empty stories dominate. In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom launched a wave of new publications, staffed by new writers. They reported fluff: financings, concepts, hires, and parties. The hard part was covering the technology and the financial realities.
We built systems that reward acceleration, and we act surprised when everything feels rushed, shallow, a little manic. The algorithm doesn’t care if something is true. It cares if it moves. Nothing moves like titillation, gossip, and startup psychodrama.
**
To see what works in this environment, look at Sam Altman and OpenAI.
Sam is everywhere. Always in the media, always talking. What matters is that he’s in the conversation. People are talking about OpenAI, about him, about their vision for the future of AI. The objective is to make OpenAI synonymous with AI. Tighten the equation until, in people’s minds, OpenAI equals AI. That constant presence, that relentless visibility, lets him raise money at ungodly valuations. Everything else is tactics.
What he says doesn’t have to mean anything; it’s no surprise he’s often self-contradictory.
Take advertising as an example. In a talk at Harvard in October 2024, Sam said, “The idea of intermingling ads and AI is uniquely unsettling to me. I think ads were important to give the early internet a business model, but they do sort of somewhat fundamentally misalign a user’s incentives with the company providing the service. I view ads as a last-resortbusiness model.”
By October 2025 his tune had changed. In January 2026, ChatGPT rolled out ads. “It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work.”
In fifteen months, he went from “uniquely unsettling” to “hopeful that a business model like this can work,” from “I hate ads” to ads running in ChatGPT. Anyone can connect the dots, but nobody does because the system doesn’t reward it.
The system rewards the next Sam interview. It seeks the sound bite that gets attention, gets views, picks up speed.Everyone covers Sam’s latest thoughts on AI, the future, and whatever else he wants to talk about that day.
You hardly see anybody connecting the dots and writing, “Here’s what Sam Altman said about advertising six months ago, here’s what he’s saying now, and here’s what that tells us about OpenAI’s actual business model versus its stated principles.” That story doesn’t get written because it requires someone to remember what was said six months ago, compare it to what is being said today, analyze the gap between rhetoric and reality, and ask why the gap exists and what it means for the company’s actual strategy.
Don’t hate the player, play the game. Like I said, velocity trumps everything.
February 1, 2026, San Francisco
The same goes for any other type of content, I believe, not just tech reviews. For example, a large number of tv shows and movies are released every week, and it doesn’t matter how good they are, just that the streaming services have “fresh” content, even when it’s crap.
What you write is what pushed me away from tech publications and tech review YouTube channels. There is no story, no critique, no substance. It’s all a elaborated Ads.
Yeah. I wrote about the rest of the media last week. So this is just more focused on how tech media is changing and all that.
But I don’t think that tech is some unique beast – it’s just the same fire in a different building. Whether it’s a politician’s economic policy or a founder’s AI architecture, the failure is the same. When the mass audience loses interest in the fundamentals, the media stops checking them. Depth isn’t dead because tech is complicated – it’s dead because it doesn’t sell. Or to put it another way, if slop sells as well as, if not better than something polished, why go to the trouble of polishing at all?
Of course, this is not just a problem for tech media, it is journalism as a whole. Modern media is a stream of click bait and shorts – why? Because it works. That is what ‘the majority’ want to consume. There are very few journalists writing intelligent, researched, balanced articles, because there are too few people who want to consume that sort of content. If you are in the significant minority (with basic analytical functions) then you are supressed by the market. The medium follows the money, and the money follows the attention.
Simon,
Thanks for the comment. I think the challenge is that all the good stuff is getting drowned out by noise. And even the good stuff is being put out behind the paywall, and is going unseen.
Too much is just too much!
Very on point Om. Hopefully more folks start to see through the shallow clock-bait content, and reflect on what we read a bit more. Then maybe we’ll pay for high quality journalism.
I sincerely hope so. I spend so much time looking for good stuff to read.
Media has been on life support for years. You summed a lot up but here’s a few more points from someone who has been on all sides of it for years.
If you are a reporter who knows the industry inside and out, the PR people will keep their clients away from you out of fear of looking bad. It’s worse if they are with an agency for fear of losing the biz. That means two layers of fear are afoot.
“Beat” reporters used to have sources. Now they have AI to do their research, as they don’t have the time to maintain relationships. Factor in a lack of competition fighting for the story sources (or leakers) have become few and far between. Now a reporter waits for the pitch, the news release or the “tweet” to follow on with the story.
The analysts who used to be a great source to frame the meaning of a story to the media, by sifting and sorting through the facts, and the b.s. told to them by the brand spokesperson, now are fighting to be relevant. I’m guessing that 75-80 percent of their revenue these days (or more—maybe I’m being kind) comes from the client side of the fence, and not from the buyers like it did 10-15 years ago. They are in a declining market.
There are too many “media shills” out there masquerading as media. They are paid to write, interview, publish, podcast, amplify other “shills” and are blatant about it. How can you tell? Real trade media or industry sector media covers all the news, doesn’t omit a release from a fledgling upstart. The shills only report on who “pays” them. We know who they are, and the only question about them should be “how much?” You know where that line comes from.
How do you spot them? Use an AI tool to count the number of times in a year a company is written about or featured. Then follow the string of “awards” or “podcasts” the company executive appears on. Do the math, and you can figure out which company is paying the most, then the next rung of pay for play.
Early on, in our respective heydays of blogging, you and I discussed transparency and I began mentioning who were my clients when I blogged about them being blogged by others like you, KT, etc. It led to me being a bigger voice, a trusted voice and a respected thought leader.
Lack of editorial oversight. Editors today (if they even exist) are managers, not the internal devil’s advocate. When I was on the staff of a newspaper in Philadelphia and covered high school sports, pro wrestling and was the “executive copy boy” at 18, there was a sports editor, three desk editors, and a cadre of reporters at the events. The desk editors took my copy, gave me pointers to rephrase the lead paragraph, questioned me on the quote and its context, and often “rewrote” some part of my copy that ended up in print. They weren’t the best reporters. Those guys found the stories. But the guys on the desk were better writers, often with eagle eyes when it came to grammar, punctuation and story structure. They had to be aware of column inches and space on every page. Today, none of that exists. Space is endless, and rarely does anyone edit a reporters work. Now it’s a race to publish, get listed on Techmeme and hope that your story is the one everyone is tweeting about.
The S in PodcaSt should be Podca$t as that game has become worse than the “shill game.” Want to talk? Be ready to $shell out. Sure there are some podcasters who don’t have a toll gate before they talk with you, but those either have an audience size where they have sponsors or not enough of one to matter. Why? Because to the market, it’s cheaper to buy your way onto a podcast than to actually earn your way there. And for the podcasters, there’s enough dough dummies out there that someone will pay you.
Deal Flow Media—The number of times a client would be told by their VC investors “we want our funding of you featured in TechCrunch” over the years was told me was silly. The VC didn’t care about a story being about what their investment was for, they wanted more exposure so the LPs backing the firm’s name in print, and so deal flow would come their way from aspiring entrepreneurs. My reply, “if we push that story today, they won’t cover what you have to offer later. Either be ready to go, or wait.”
Pedigree Journalism—if the CEO, CTO or founder had an exit or two, and the team looked like the 1992 USA Olympic Dream Team in Basketball, cover the story became the way some publications cover the news. Even to this day. It doesn’t matter how outlandish the idea is, and the fact that there’s no market, the pedigree of where the founders and execs were before was the angle being pitched. But ask if there’s a “there there” and quickly the story falls apart.
Media died because it’s easier to go direct. Direct marketing (i.e. mass mailing) of old now is backed by data. Digital marketing dollars outsize the PR budgets of most tech brands. Why? The answer should be obvious. You can tell your prospects whatever you want to say, and there’s no “gatekeeper.” The media, be it mass, trade, or social, are in every way. It could be because they don’t value the story, or because you’re not offering enough “value” to them.
Om- I read you all the time. Why? You don’t play those games. You never did.
About OpenAI, does anyone believe anything Sam Altman says anymore?
And about journalism, I know it’s about velocity, about getting more stuff out there than the other guy. But at some point George Schultz has to be right. “Credibility is the coin of the realm.” If you don’t have credibility, you got nothing, and Sam ain’t got any. He spent is chasing fame, money, and attention.
It is about being in the news cycle all the time and raising money all the time. Candidly he is doing The Kardashian Rules proud.
Does the subscription model offer a viable alternative that demands and rewards quality? Or does subscription just not have the scale that is required to move the needle?
I think the challenge with the subscription model is that it limits the scale. In a way there has to be a better way of doing the subs that allows reach and at the same time ability to do things well. But the reality is that the information now flows in a different manner than ever before.
On point. You’re mostly mentioning how it’s look like from journalism prism when journalist is getting knowledge, investigate and write to provide content for a reader, a good content. I intentionally mention ‘reader’ here because it must be there to accept that content provided, i.e
someone writes, others read, that’s what completes ‘transaction’ of comms. Going further what I want to say that reader has changed a lot too, maybe even adapted to that velocity and speed unconsciously and now he’s on some point unable to accept that ‘dot connecting’ comms because of attention span, poor concentration as reading that better written content requires effort and sometimes huge effort. They tend not to invest just simply because there’s, guess what, more content waiting, FOMO and all that rat race stuff. And that principle applies on YT, ad media, wherever (not saying ‘social’ on purpose).
Bingo!
This is what I articulated in my previous essay on Velocity, I think in the end, we are at a declining scale of what matters. And what does’t. Because attention is changing so much.