Why you can't trust tech press to teach you about the tech industry
If there were one lesson I'd want to impress upon people who are interested in succeeding in the technology industry, it would be, as I've said before, know your s**t. Know the discipline you're in …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dash's essay lands almost exactly a year after TechCrunch's 'The Tech Press: Screw Them All' (May 2011), which had already turned the industry-versus-press relationship into open conflict — but Dash shifts the target from the press itself to its readers, arguing the real cost of thin tech coverage falls on people trying to build careers on what they absorb from it.
The piece traveled fast through the same community it critiques: the pickup list runs through prominent tech-commentator Twitter accounts, including working journalists like Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) and Bobbie Johnson (@bobbiejohnson), alongside investors like Dave McClure (@davemcclure) — so by end of day the question of whether tech press can teach anyone anything was being argued by the press itself.
First-order effects
- For aspiring technologists, the practical directive changes: Dash tells them to build expertise inside a specific discipline rather than outsource judgment to trade coverage, making firsthand mastery the stated prerequisite for success.
- Tech press outlets face a credibility challenge framed by one of the industry's most-followed commentator-writers, with the criticism amplified by journalists in their own audience rather than dismissed as outsider griping.
Second-order effects
- Coming on the heels of TechCrunch's own 2011 broadside against the press ecosystem, the critique now has both insider and operator voices behind it, pushing outlets to treat practitioner skepticism as a recurring reputational problem rather than a one-off spat.
- Practitioner blogs and personal essays gain standing relative to institutional coverage, since Dash's argument implicitly routes readers toward sources written by people doing the work instead of reporting on it.
Third-order effects
- If distrust of trade coverage keeps hardening, gatekeeping over industry knowledge migrates from newsrooms to operator-authored channels, shrinking the press's role in defining what competence in tech looks like.
- A persistent gap between press framing and practitioner reality becomes a structural feature of the tech-media relationship, one each side periodically relitigates in public rather than resolves.
The trend: In 2012, criticism of tech media from inside the industry was consolidating into a recurring public genre, with operators arguing firsthand disciplinary expertise should outrank press mediation.