It is time for newsrooms to cover technology extensively, across desks, acting as watchdogs rather than cheerleaders
A lowly tech employee was trying to do some simple task online and found out it was really hard. Inspired by that difficulty, he—and it was almost always a he …
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 Columbia Journalism Review argument lands midway through a debate the corpus has been tracking for years. A 2016 Nieman Reports account had already diagnosed why skeptical tech coverage was scarce: media and tech firms blurring into each other, Silicon Valley's culture of secrecy, and thin staffing for the beat made tech reporting difficult. The piece's answer is structural — stop treating technology as a specialist desk's territory and make every desk treat it as a watchdog subject.
What came after shows the call was partly answered and partly contested. By late 2019, CJR itself noted tech journalists had embraced the watchdog role while pressing them toward solutions rather than palace intrigue embraced a watchdog role, and flagged how 'on background' briefings had become Silicon Valley's default accountability-dodging channel default method for ducking accountability. By 2024, the open question was economic: publishers hesitate to fund nuanced tech reporting without clear ROI hesitate to invest without clear ROI.
First-order effects
- For newsroom editors, the directive dissolves the tech beat as a silo — business, politics, health, and culture reporters are all expected to interrogate the technology embedded in their subjects, raising the skill bar across the staff.
- For Silicon Valley communications operations, a dispersed watchdog press corps is harder to manage than a small circle of beat reporters who depend on access.
Second-order effects
- Access-dependent journalism gives way to adversarial sourcing: once 'on background' becomes the industry's standard deflection, cross-desk watchdogs must rely more on documents, employees, and critics than on executive briefings.
- Publishers face the funding tension directly — watchdog coverage across desks costs training and time, and the Asterisk critique shows investment stalls when nuanced work lacks a measurable return.
Third-order effects
- If the watchdog model holds, tech accountability stops being a niche product and becomes a standing editorial function — but the 2020 reframing of 'tech vs. journalism' as 'managers vs. employees' suggests the reporters doing this work can themselves become targets inside their own organizations journalists covering workplace activism become targets.
- The longer-term risk the corpus points to is a two-tier field: sensational scandal coverage that clears the ROI bar versus the resource-intensive accountability reporting that watchdog rhetoric demands but few publishers will fund.
The trend: Tech journalism is migrating from a specialist beat toward a cross-desk accountability function, with its durability hinging on whether publishers will fund scrutiny that lacks obvious returns.