maramine blog

Every writer who covers tech gets accused of bias. These accusations most often come from young, passionate readers with strong biases. Oh the irony. I get comments and emails accusing me of being biased several times each week. Typically, I ignore them. Sometimes, I reply.

When I do reply, I try to be frank and also to use little-boy words under the assumption that most of the people who send these emails are young teenagers who read headlines and then draw conclusions. If my responses are too wordy, these kids will likely lose interest after a few sentences.

Below is an example of one such exchange. I publish this for young writers who will inevitably be accused of being biased. Repeatedly, in all likelihood. If this is your chosen line of work, you will often be inclined to defend your writing, but consider your approach. When I see bloggers publicly respond in the comments section below a post with aggression and insults, I shudder. It’s easy to be defensive but it is infinitely more productive—and less embarrassing—to explain to your accusers why they might be wrong.

If you must reply, keep it simple and honest. You will be surprised how often such responses will either silence your accusers, or even help them to understand why their feelings may be misguided. On numerous occasions, my responses have led to great exchanges and readers who become more loyal than ever.

From: [redacted]
Reply-To: [redacted]
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 04:49:22 -0400
To: Team <team@bgr.com>
Subject: CONTACT Bye Bye

Name: Chris [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

So,

I’ve been subscribed to your feed for ages. This morning I removed your feed and I felt I needed to tell you why.

You have some good content, but it’s eclipsed by your apple evangelism; which is totally biased and not professional. Please say you’re making money out of it, because it’s sad otherwise.

regards

Chris

—

[Response]

It’s easy for people unfamiliar with the way this business works to toss out the oft-misused “bias” accusation, but I assure you that if the bulk of our coverage focused on a company or companies that you favor, you would not believe us to be “biased.”

As it stands, BGR is a business and we have to write about what people want to read about. We cover numerous companies extensively, of course, but Apple is currently the most popular tech company in the world. As such, we cover them more than other companies for obvious reasons: this is what our readers want to read. Apple stories are almost always our most trafficked.

We’ll continue doing what we do, and we’re sorry to see you go. Thanks for being a BGR reader as long as you were, though, and hopefully when the tide turns and the bulk of our coverage focuses on the next big tech company, you’ll come back around to check out the site again.

All the best,

-Zach

The screen capture above is from Tech Investor News, one of my favorite Websites. It is an aggregation service that pulls in RSS feeds from a variety of sources, all tech-focused, and organizes the feeds into a variety of relevant categories. The image above is from the “Blogs + Tech Dialogue” section.

While TIN does a great job of assembling content from many great sources and presenting it all logically, the problem highlighted above is one that affects all similar services. Clearly, a sponsored post (advertisement) and a story about Charlie Sheen’s troubled marriage have no place in this timeline.

Technology that will filter such content without affecting desirable articles at least occasionally, is something needs to happen. With as many smart people focused on the future of digital content as there are right now — and have been for years — I would think more progress would have been made.

Techmeme does a good job of filtering, but it’s thanks entirely to a human element. The same is true for All Things Digital’s Voices column — in fact, I believe each and every story on Voices is added by a person. The human editor does things that automatic aggregation currently cannot of course, but it also introduces a new problem in the form of bias. Humans always have some amount of bias that is inherent to our nature and as such, we’ll never be suited for this particular task.

So, brilliant developers and rockstar entrepreneurs devoting your lives to finding ways to get rich on the internet, it’s time to get to work. There are thousands of people across the Web churning out quality content that people want to see, and we need better ways to discover and absorb it. Make “the news” smarter.