Technology Growth Offers Advantage to Beat Reporters

As a consumer technology reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle's business desk, Benny Evangelista tracked the DVD industry's rapid growth in the early part of the decade.

Monitoring that expansion was just one advantage to covering consumer/personal technology issues, he says. On his beat, he also has freedom to dictate most of the coverage and gets to sample the coolest new toys on the market.

"You get to review new and exciting gadgets," says Evangelista, who has been covering consumer tech issues since 1995. "It's been interesting."

Despite the tech bust, consumer technology is still a coveted beat at many magazines and newspapers. But how best to approach the subject isn't all fun and games, reporters say.

They usually handle the beat in one of two ways: as tech geeks or as consumers.

Newspaper writers, such as Evangelista, often take the latter because they serve a mainstream readership. They compose their pieces as if they are talking to fellow consumers, using simple language and an interactive writing style.

"I'm not so much of a tech geek," Evangelista says. "I have to, of course, understand how software or hardware works."

But many of his readers "don't know how stuff works and don't care how stuff works," he adds. "They just want it to work."

So he focused on the pricing options and user-friendliness of new products in pieces this year on disposable camcorders and a television-transporting service called Orb Networks.

USA Today columnist Edward C. Baig, who started covering the consumer tech beat in 1990, got on the beat by positioning himself as a journalist interested in technology "rather than a technophile interested in writing." That persona has served him well.

"I'm a consumer of this stuff myself," says Baig, who writes a weekly "Cyberspeak" column for USA Today. "So I very much judge products on how they hit me. … I judge products on easiness of use, what the benefit is, would I buy it?"

Baig says his editor's reaction can often be the best judge of whether he's explaining products and issues in detail to readers without talking down to them.

"I'll include all of the basics and anything that's important enough for people to know," he says. "If people want to know every last spec, there are places to go for that info."

One of those places is BusinessWeek, where Stephen H. Wildstrom pens the "Technology & You" column. Wildstrom and his 11-year-old column target an older demographic.

The typical BusinessWeek reader, Wildstrom says, is a 40-something male executive, a demographic with which the 57-year-old writer can identify. So his columns cater to that audience. For instance, he writes about such topics as a comparison of the kiddie cell phones parents should consider and how to transfer music from vinyl LP records or tapes onto a PC, and has ignored normally hot issues that he thinks won't relate to his readers, such as digital music and gaming.

Wildstrom is given a lot of leeway by his editors to decide what to write about. He relishes that freedom, which he never had covering the auto industry or politcs.

But that autonomy can also be overwhelming at times. Public relations staffers send consumer tech writers many more items than they have the time or space to write about.

"You're sort of wading through all that stuff that comes in every day," Wildstrom says. "It does get tedious."

Another challenge is detaching yourself from the products, just as sports reporters must not cheer in the press box. That comes with developed journalism skills. That takes "a healthy dose of skepticism," Baig says.

"I'm not afraid to criticize," he says. "I don't feel any pressure to say good things" about products.

Though, consumer tech reporters often go beyond reviews of products. Many of them also cover breaking technology news and tech companies, and some, like Evangelista, even conduct podcasts, or audio pieces that can be downloaded from their publication's Web sites.

But the heart of the beat is writing about consumer electronics. And figuring out which ones to celebrate and which to ignore or blast sets consumer tech writers apart and determines their credibility with readers.

Who predicted, for example, that sales of DVD players in the U.S. (from 3.5 to 25 million) and shipments of DVDs in North America (from 98 to 685 million) would surge so much from 1999 to 2002? Or that Microsoft's WebTV would fail to catch on with so many consumers?

"Trying to sort out what is going to be the next DVD player and what is going to be the next WebTV, that's the challenge," Evangelista says. So he often asks himself, when considering a product: "It may look cool and sound interesting, but do consumers really want it?"

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism