Re:Why the tech press is ignoring Zulily's huge IPO
by kaa2102 on Friday November 15, 2013 @06:01PM
(#6742715)
In a way, this speaks to the concept of journalism in an echo chamber and being fooled by randomness. Ultimately, people (including journalists) are bad at prediction. The "accessible" founders that get noticed first get the press' attention. Next to market companies get labeled as [First mover] for [niche].
"Accessibility" has a lot to do with one's connections with journalists and perhaps location to some extent. It seems like a broken model is being used to determine what is newsworthy in tech.
Re:Why the tech press is ignoring Zulily's huge IPO
by ohjeez on Sunday November 17, 2013 @11:27AM
(#6749523)
I'd take location out of it. Just as good developers learn to communicate over distance (e.g. over IRC), so do journalists. I know remarkably few tech journalists who still live in the Bay Area.
Reddit didn't get a lot of press attention because -- among other things -- the people behind it were not easy to find and talk with. (They still aren't.) If as a journalist I can't connect with you to, say, fact check something I'm writing, your chances of being covered are much lower.
Plus, when Reddit was on the upswing, there were a _lot_ of competing sites that were trying to be "Digg for [niche]," such as DZone as "digg for developers" and dotnetkicks as "digg for the .net people so we can be even more granular," and agileblend and so on. Not to mention older sharing sites like delicious (which is, um, still around?). So initially it seemed like "yet another link sharing site," and one that was far more confusing even to us tech press geeks.