I myself am not a great writer. I would say it out loud anytime, anywhere. I make typos, I get off topic at times and my style might not be the most catching one out there. But at least my writings are based on thoughts from my head.
Let me clarify what I'm trying to say. There's a big difference between reporting on facts and reporting on opinions. Both are OK, if you mention the source. I can't wrap my mind around the fact that some (most) journalists (especially in the tech industry) don't have a problem giving credit to the source of facts, but often forget to do the same with opinions.
I am of course talking about the suspicious uniformity of opinions in the tech industry. The one example for all, that actually forced me to write this article and formulate my thoughts that have been flying around my mind for a long time, happened today. Apple released three new commercials today (link). My opinion? They're not their best ones so far, but I find them rather humorous.
But let's look the major tech sites and how they handled this story.
"They all star a single actor who portrays an Apple Genius Bar employee, and stupidity appears to be the other unifying theme."
"From the famous '1984' ad for Macintosh, 1997's 'Think Different,' the 2006 John Hodgman / Justin Long 'Get a Mac' series through to today's iPhone ads, the work of TBWA/Chiat/Day has been consistently simple and clever, …"
"The quality falls off when the same genius (who apparently sleeps in a blue Apple T-shirt and puts on his name tag to answer the door) interacts with increasingly silly customers, one whose wife is about give birth and another who bought a PC thinking it was a Mac."
"The three commercials are related by the stupidity - and the naivety of the company that made the commercials."(translated from Czech)
So we can see that a certain number of the tech news sites have this opinion (that they are entitled to). It might be the majority of the articles published on this topic today that is negative. The weird part is that when you look into the comments on these websites - it seems like the readers have a different opinion. By my count, with readers, it's about 60 % pro and 40 % con. But the tech news sites? About 10 % pro and 90 % con.
I ask myself, is it different people? Is it one world, where the readers live and the technology they use affects their life in some way - and then a different world, where the writers and publishers live, where everything is awful? I say, no way.
I call copycat bullshit. If you read a few of these articles, you can see that most of them link to about five original stories. Are the writers nowadays so lazy that they not only re-write articles to get readers (money from ads, of course), but they even copy opinions? The same thing happened a couple of months ago with the realistic designs of Apple apps. One influential article published on theverge.com and suuuudenly, everyone hates skeuomorphism.
I don't know guys. I understand that the readers pay for the ads that pay your bills. But seriously, you should not publish at all cost. Source facts of course, but please, make your own opinions. I'm fed up with reading the same exact opinion on ten different sites.
Imagine a world, where there wouldn't be one/two sources and the rest wasn't full of copycats. Imagine a world, in which everyone created something new. Can you imagine how cool that would be?