One of the most annoying things about "news" is that it has largely been replaced by punditry. Sure, a couple of the big newspapers and the big three TV networks more or less do real news, but for the most part, the rest of the field is filled with punditry and opinions. And worse, that's what people seem to prefer. See: All cable news.
Technology news has started to go that way as well. You used to have a number of sites that really focused on reporting the news, and there were podcasts and video pieces that did it too. Most of that has been replaced with "top 5 reasons company X blows goats and will fail" and other such nonsense. Deep dives on businesses that make stuff are getting to be rare as well.
The reasons for the decline are pretty obvious. First of all, it's pretty cheap to put up a bunch of words that don't mean anything beyond what some blowhard thinks. But second, and this is the really sad part, people apparently want this dipshittery.
About six years ago, this wasn't the case. If you were into nerdy stuff, there were fantastic places on the Intertubes to really get into it. There was no race to be first to talk about something. Thoughtful analysis was coupled with bona fide news.
How did it get like this? I suppose part of it is that the really geeky stuff is pretty mainstream. I mean, when I got the first iPhone, most "normal" people I knew just looked at me and asked why I needed it. Now, well, pretty much everyone has an iPhone.
There's a part of me that would love to write about the nerdy stuff in the fashion of which I once coveted. I've got a fun domain name for it, even. But really, there is very little win there. There's no money in it, I would rather spend that time parenting, and frankly, I'm not into the whole online micro-celebrity personality thing. (The irony there is that said phenomenon is probably what makes people "successful" at it.)
I need different time wasters.
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