The Tech and Media Culture War That Isn’t

Happy Fourth of July everyone! I hope you find a way to relax wherever you are. I am feeling so lucky to be able to spend some time with family. If you missed any of our important stories this week, including Mark Zuckerberg’s response to the growing advertising boycott, Ron Conway’s new venture fund (with Pharrell) and Jessica Toonkel’s great profile of Jason Kilar, the former CEO of Hulu who is running WarnerMedia—check them out.

Earlier this week, Google calendar sent me an annual reminder to update The Information’s business registration with California’s Secretary of State. You see, it turns out that seven years ago, when I signed a piece of paper and started a company, the thing I was most worried about was forgetting this business filing. Ah, the good old days!

Of course, as our corporate anniversary approaches next week, my concerns as a CEO and founder have shifted wildly. We welcomed three new reporters this week—Ross Matican, Paris Martineau and Mark Di Stefano. I’ve never met two of them, and I don’t know how long it will be before I can.

But I try to appreciate the small reminders of how far we have come in seven years, and, I suppose, how much I have grown. As always, I feel tremendous gratitude to all the people who have helped me figure out that the most important things about building a company and trying to reinvent the news business go far beyond paperwork. Thank you.

A Brawl not a Reckoning

Reporters, tech investors and executives like to think they are at the center of the world. And this week, based on conversations on Twitter, it briefly felt like they were.

For months, a handful of outspoken venture capitalists have been attacking journalists for 1) downplaying coronavirus earlier this year and 2) just generally being horrible traffic-seekers the world would be better off without. Journalists, including myself, haven’t been able to resist pointing out the absurdity of their arguments, which have gone as far to suggest that journalists shouldn’t exist.

Things turned very nasty this week when the anti-media ringleader and angel investor Bajali Srinivasan called New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz a “sociopath”, claiming to just be following the format of her own attacks about Steph Korey, the co-founder of Away. On Twitter, Lorenz shared very disturbing accounts of Srinivasan’s personal attacks on her and other “vicious harassment” she’s received as a result.

If you followed the back and forth, you probably feel as sick as I do. No reporter or person should have to endure the type of public and private treatment Lorenz received, even if you disagree, as I have, with some comments she has made on social media or think she has crossed some lines.

And perhaps you, like me, found yourself wondering how we got to this place of intense rancor between reporters and the tech people they write about. Indeed, venture capitalists and reporters took to Twitter on Thursday to outline the bigger forces at play, and try to explain why even well-known investors like Ben Horowitz and Paul Graham were getting dragged into this brawl.

I started to write a column on that very topic. Is it the environment set by President Trump’s attacks on the media? Reporters’ anxiety about the future of the media business? How about privilege, greed, ego, jealousy, too much free time during a pandemic and so on? I was grasping for a bigger lesson here, a sweeping point to make it all make sense.

But the lesson I ended up learning turned out to be the one we keep learning about the internet and how it manipulates conversation.

Because I soon realized, Twitter, where these debates are mostly playing out, is not the real world. And this—despite what the instigators would like us to believe—is not a real moment of cultural reckoning. By treating it as one, we’re playing into the hands of the people who started it.

(As aside, these debates are also playing out in the buzzy startup Clubhouse, where lots of venture capitalists and some journalists go to chat, or gripe, in voice chat rooms. It goes without saying that Clubhouse is also very much, not the real world.)

In fact, as I thought about it, there are numerous signs that people who work in the tech industry are engaging with the media more—not less—which seems unlikely if they truly believe journalism shouldn’t exist. Where do you think all those stories of leaked all-hands conversations from oh-so-many companies are coming from? Tech employees and executives who want to talk to reporters.

CEOs—all the way from Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai to Zoom CEO Eric Yuan and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield—appear to be talking to reporters more, not less in interviews and op-eds.

And people who work in the tech industry appear to be reading more news and supporting it.

That doesn’t seem like a war to me. It's more like a border skirmish with the independent republic of VC-land.

Of course, the relationship between reporters and the people they cover—in the tech industry or anywhere really—is tense. It always is and needs to be. No powerful people are in a position to comment on (or even really see) the full extent of their power, and they certainly don’t like it when others point it out. That’s why journalism exists.

But journalists like myself, as well as anyone with a social media account, would be wise to resist getting sucked into a personal social media debate, even one that touches important social themes.

Because that’s exactly what the people provoking the debate—on both sides—want us to do. Talking about people, tagging them, saying they are worth arguing against publicly—it all makes them more visible and therefore powerful.

The best playbook for building attention is to try to divide people over some big issue. It works especially well on the internet, where people are willing to say things they would never say to a person’s face.

We’ve seen it radicalize everything from pop culture to politics. And people who work in technology and media should recognize it when it arrives in their own backyard.

So, instead of having the war some people want to have, let’s fight and argue over bigger issues that matter, like the power of technology companies and their impact on everything, including—and especially—journalism.

Thursday’s Panel with Facebook and Google

Accenture and The Information are hosting a live discussion on July 9th to talk about the small business recovery globally and how tech platforms can play a part. We’ll be talking to Alice Mansergh of Google and Alexander Mann from Facebook. Sign up here. (Europe-friendly time!)

News Summer School

I’m thrilled this is kicking off next week. For all those registered, please check your email to join the Facebook group for further details.

This Week's The Information Articles:

• IPO Contender Snowflake on Pace for $400 Million in 2020 Revenue by Kevin McLaughlin
• Tech’s Hidden Diversity Problem: Executive Headhunters by Cory Weinberg
• SoftBank-Backed Katerra Lays Off More Than 400 Employees by Cory Weinberg
• The Tech Entrepreneur Who Loves to Troll Silicon Valley by Zo? Bernard
• TikTok Vulnerable to Fake Followers, Security Firm Warns by Alex Heath
• Kilar’s Radical Vision for WarnerMedia: Putting Consumers First by Jessica Toonkel
• Zuckerberg Tells Facebook Staff He Expects Advertisers to Return ‘Soon Enough’ by Alex Heath
• Uber CEO Wants to Shift More Engineering Jobs to India, Sparking Internal Debate by Amir Efrati
• The Information’s News Summer School: The Schedule by The Information Staff
• Pharrell Williams, Ron Conway Teaming Up for New Venture Fund by Kate Clark
• The Information’s 411 — A Little More Moderation by Tom Dotan