Business Insight Zone

Jeff Jarvis got me thinking about this topic with his post this morning:

Don’t bet on them

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it. Hillary Clinton has the nomination locked up. Rudy Giuliani is the sure nominee. Mike Huckabee is surging for the long haul. John McCain’s campaign is dead. Mitt Romney’s the one to beat. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is dead. Everything’s over last night.

(In case you’re not familiar with Jeff’s work: if you care about what’s going on in the media, you should be reading him. You won’t always agree with him, regardless of where you’re coming from — but that’s a good thing.)

Here’s part of the comment I left on Jeff’s post:

Amen, Jeff. Another one that’s tired every time I read it: “Are we in a recession already? Is this a recession? How do you define ‘recession’? Let’s ask Warren Buffett if he thinks we’re in a recession!” Blah-blah-blah.

Okay, yeah, it’s somewhat interesting to note when an official, formal, word-from-on-high recession starts and ends BUT meanwhile (a) in the tough times that inspire these kinds of stories, there’s ALWAYS something better to be reporting in terms of what’s going on at the ground level in the marketplace (and not just the financial markets!) and (b) an official, formal recession is always — by definition — definable only in hindsight anyway. Oh, yeah, and declaring a formal recession is also fraught with political agendas.

LB’s follow-up to Jeff’s post hits the nail on the head:

1. Reporters are human.

2. Many humans are lazy.

3. Horse-race coverage is designed by and for lazy reporters.

4. There is never any apparent penalty for making wrong predictions [...]

Since I first read this, I thought of one more prime example of this phenomenon, one I’ve discussed frequently with Hoover’s crackerjack semiconductor writer, Jeff Dorsch: I mean the inevitable period revisits to Moore’s Law and how it can’t possibly — possibly! — be sustained very much longer. (Cue the voice of Scotty from Star Trek: “I dinna think she can take much more, Cap’n!”)

Mind you, there are good Moore’s Law stories out there, like this one that ran recently in the New York Times:

Trying to Put New Zip Into Moore’s Law

Why is this story better than the run of the mill? Because it focuses on the real challenges faced by chip makers, and talks about what a big chip maker — IBM — is doing to keep Moore’s Law going.

But keeping the heart of innovation beating is becoming ever harder and more expensive. Making chips is an improbable blend of farming, photography and baking: think of your standard 300-millimeter silicon wafer as a field where mostly metallic substances are “grown” according to patterns put in place by photolithography, and then “baked” at extremely high temperatures. [...]

The remarkable progression of Moore’s Law, meanwhile, involves continually shrinking almost everything to do with the chips. Today, the transistors in a high-end chip are no wider than the nucleus of a smallish cell . . . that’s far smaller than the smallest light wave.

Many Moore’s Law stories of the slow-news-week variety, by contrast, focus on how semiconductor engineers have very nearly squeezed every possible advantage out of Material X, Process Y, or Technique Z in their quest for ever-faster and -smaller microchips — and arrive at the conclusion that Moore’s Law simply can’t go on.

The problem with this is that many innovative, hyper-competitive, and well-capitalized chip companies have a staunch vested interest in continuing to improve speeds, scale, throughput, etc. in their chips. As a rule, when they come up against the physical limitation of a certain material or process . . . they look elsewhere, as the NYT story aptly points out (”Mr. Edelstein is leading a team of researchers from inside and outside I.B.M. in developing a new way to solve the problem . . .”).

Okay, that might be more than you wanted to know about Moore’s Law and how it gets mis-covered, but maybe the point is clear: we see a lot of useless stories that don’t reflect real reporting or real insight into the topics at hand. Worse, we see these stories on cue at certain predictable points.

What are your (least) favorite examples of “news” stories you can safely ignore?

[Racetrack photo by Brian Teutsch; photos of Gordon Moore and original Moore's Law graph courtesy of Intel.]

Category: Media