[nikcub]

I think you have a false nostalgia for what "old school" tech reporting was. Before web publishing and blogs, many tech magazines were nothing more than press releases and a couple of opinion pieces stapled together. It was trade press, not journalism.

Amongst the cabal of editors, PR and companies the racket was positive coverage in return for access.

At least today we have viable independent sources who can build an audience without giving a crap about access or offending PR people.

[mjn]

There was certainly a lot of trade press (PC World, many of the gaming magazines, etc.), but a number of the '80s and '90s tech magazines were pretty good, with independent content and reporting. For example: Byte, Dr. Dobbs, and the first 10 years of Wired come to mind.

[nikcub]

Byte, Dr. Dobbs, MSDN mag, Builder and the early Wired I remember fondly. Reading it really felt like you were part of something special, like a private audience with some of the smartest people in the world.

Those magazines were also hard to get, I would travel by bus to a larger library in the city, or download what was available via BBS. Everything that was mainstream such as the PC mags was just complete garbage. You were lucky to get 300 words in a tech section, and even then it would be something simple like teaching a DOS single command each issue.

For me that has been replaced by HN, reddit, other aggregators and a much broader range of sources. The difference now is that there is enough high quality content that I could spend 12 hours a day reading it, whereas 15 years ago I remember I would read all the magazines within a week or so and then eagerly wait out the following 3 weeks for the next issue to arrive.

There is so much high quality content on the web now. If there is any complaint, it should be that it is difficult to find and surface. I would love a pure technical, programmer oriented community that is not news related but rather just interesting advanced tech related, picking out old good stories from those good sources or finding real gems in individual blogs.

Most online communities and aggregators are too focused on content from the past 15 minutes. Even an article published 24 hours ago is seen as 'old news'.

[jbrodkin]

That's true. There was a time when it wasn't easy for regular folks to find press releases and announcements, so there were all these magazines marketed to IT pros and tech executives that just regurgitated marketing materials, and that could be perceived as being a valuable service.

Of course, some of the websites still do that :-) But you really need to add original reporting or analysis today to stand out.