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Comment by throwaway192874 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway192874

> Why have we chosen these 13 random publications? I'm assuming that the NYT is included literally just because the people who did this study don't like the NYT?

These are some of the biggest media publications that write about tech issues, these aren't just "random" choices. This author seems to focus on "big tech media" as is mentioned in the article multiple times, these are big tech media, independent journalists are not.

Anecdotal, but I know every one of them off the top of my head, I've personally never heard of AnandTech and had to google it.

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The big tech media term is just bullshit. "Big Tech" describes a handful of companies that employ hundreds of thousands of people. "Big Tech media" is either media about big tech - in which case this list is a horrible mis-representation missing some of the most obvious names in big tech journalism (Gruber, Gurman, MKBHD for Apple journalism for example, the Wallstreet Journal breaking the Facebook whistleblower and Theranos). Or it can be read as big "Tech Media" in which case it's also misleading- since the 13 companies in "Big Tech Media" account for less than 1,000 employees compared to the the "Big Tech" companies that account for hundreds of thousands of employees each. You're literally comparing an ant hill to mount everest.

Well now you're shifting the goal posts to a different topic. I was responding to your claim of this set of companies being random and your concern about some not being included

The size of these companies is irrelevant to that point

And who are these companies you keep mentioning? They don't even come up when I search them on DuckDuckGo. That's how small they are in comparison to the companies the author included as "big tech"

I'm not moving the goal posts -the goal posts as I'll state them is "Big Tech Media" is a nebulous term that you can't reasonably define as these 13 companies. I don't know why you're struggling to find the people I've listed, MKBHD is arguably the single largest tech youtuber, John Gruber at daring fireball regularly appears on HN, Mark Gurman - at Bloomberg is basically the leading reporter to cover Apple, and I don't think we need to explain how big Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal are. But they're conspicuous by their absense. As for the ones that are on the list - they're largely just brand names as part larger conglomerates like Conde Naste or Future Plc, or Yahoo!

What I'm saying is we can have standards like "I took the 10 brands that have the top ranking on Alexa in this category plus 5 tech arms of larger titles" - or something like that, an actual objective standard for what they're selecting rather than a grab bag of 13 random companies.

I've heard of them. GigaOm is more on analyst firm in its current incarnation but overall it seems a reasonable list of media companies.

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