Technology Journalism Quotes

I started my career as a liberal arts major from Berkeley, wrote about enterprise IT for a few years, then followed my passion for the digital narrative into graduate school as well (also at Berkeley, the Oxford of the West or, perhaps, the Harvard - sorry Stanford!). My first project out of grad school was 'Wired' magazine.

People say to me that I'm a role model in technology, but it makes me laugh, because I'm not a technologist, I'm a journalist - that's my background.

I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.

From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.

I have on my wall right now a front page of the 'Journal' from January 1991, when I co-wrote a front-page story about Iraq firing missiles at Israel. By October, I was writing about tech products.

For tech, I like the 'DailySearchCast', 'TWiT' and anything Veronica Belmont does on CNET. I think Perez Hilton is a riot, and the rest of my consumption is by people: Folks like Dave Winer, Fred Wilson, Mark Cuban, Brian Alvey, Jeff Jarvis, Xeni Jardin, etc.

I became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter 'Release 1.0,' which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

I'm a big fan of Mashable and TechCrunch and other outlets like that, but TechMeme obviously does an amazing job of aggregating.

My first company produced 'Silicon Alley Reporter' magazine, where I held the dual titles of CEO and Editor.

I shifted my career when I was 44 to quit the Washington beats. I had a great Washington beat, a series of them, and I quit to start my tech column, which was a different kind of tech column.

I was a technology reporter. And I think everybody who covers tech at some point or another feels like a little kid with their face pressed against the glass looking in at the candy shop and going, 'Wow, it looks so cool and so much fun.'

Many science-fiction writers, such as Gregory Benford, are working scientists. Many others, such as Joe Haldeman, have advanced degrees in science. Others, like me, have backgrounds in science and technology journalism.

From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.