State of Tech Journalism in 2026: Follow the Money
Published 1.5 hours ago in The Register MS:
Robber barons and mega-corporations own or partly own today's important/impactful news outlets. This makes financial sense to them and nobody is stopping them.
This problem gets worse every year; they strive to control the narrative, not just about themselves and their stakes of interest. The above example from The Register MS is very new and very symptomatic; last night we the same from Steven Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN), who writes in The Register MS. See, in order to understand what motivates an opinion piece one must follow the money.
At the Linux Foundation (LF), for example, tech advice follows the bribes. Slop is bad? TAKE BRIBE. Now it's "GOOD"! So ahead now, we dare you, SHILL it!!! Praise it!
Same for Rust, which GAFAM incubated inside the belly or the corpse of Mozilla. Now the LLM slop promotes Rust [1, 2] (the latter example is only hours old).
This will get worse over time.
It is only fair to say that today's LF is an unofficial bribery hub, almost a money-laundering organisation. Via LF, companies habitually buy influence not only over "Linux" et al but "access" in the media also. SJVN is one of their lying/PR operatives, a coin-operated person whom they boast about in their brochures (yes, they openly advertise him as such). Jono Bacon was too. LF even sells you "tweets" from 'influencers' such as these.
So a lot of what we see online is paid-for SPAM, even if that seems to come from so-called 'influencers' or "thought leaders" or whatever.
This saddens us and it ought to sadden you, too.
As noted above, just to repeat, in order to understand what motivates an opinion piece one must follow the money. █
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Image source: New Journalism