Steady pace means un-news isn't no news
October 1, 2014
By Ron Seybold
What does it say about the HP 3000 when the steadiest story about the 3000 doesn’t involve an HP 3000? You can’t wear one, like an Apple Watch, or buy a brand-new HP 3000. Your server’s operating system is unchanged after more than four years, unless you’re buying a custom-crafted patch. The mission for this general purpose machine hasn’t changed, either.
It might be that the most constant news about the HP 3000 of 2014 is there’s no fresh news. So what’s an editor to do when his blog and publication includes the word Newswire? To conjure content, I reach back, and I look ahead. What is ahead of us doesn’t involve much HP iron, and certainly nothing new wearing a Hewlett-Packard 3000 badge on its chest. I only have to reach back to see a story where wearing something to compute wasn’t a novel concept. Not according to my files here in the office.
I work a lot out of the files these days.
This rambling is a way of describing my frustration and then a calm acceptance about the limited rate of change. I came into the journalism business with the knowledge that new was best. My first newspapering job came in a small Texas town with a competing paper just down the block. You’d wonder why a county seat of 3,500 would ever need two newspapers. It was 1982, a year when plenty of towns had two papers. Journalism has changed. Now there’s an infographic out there with the Then and Now of information. A reporter is now considered a blogger, and press conferences are now Twitter chats.
I came to tech journalism and got scooped within three weeks. Scoop, for any who’ve forgotten, is when a competitor learns and prints something before you can. One year at an Interex conference, we scooped all day at our booth. Ice cream, supplied by the hotel’s catering department. The word was synonymous with elite information.
There are press releases today, but they’re called content. Some still fill my inbox, but they come from non-3000 markets. The investment of an envelope and stamp is gone, just like an investment in HP-branded iron has been replaced by an offsite, up in the cloud server. Not free, but oh so less costly.
Even the vendor knew there was more than one kind of news. And HP was where the new models were being crafted.
So here, crossing into the 20th year of the 3000 Newswire, we now print once a quarter. We issue a story or message about 22 times per month, but the news that is new appears on the same ratio as our new print edition to old print issue: one story out of four. There’s the one, of course, but these days it’s as likely to be about a virtual 3000 or a cloud opportunity as anything directly related to MPE software or applications.
What’s a reporter to do? I made my transition to blogger more than nine years ago, wearing a reporter’s fedora at the same time. (Fedora: a short-brimmed hat with a Press card tucked into its brim. For further reference see the 1931 movie, The Front Page.)
But as this 20th fall season arrived in the NewsWire’s office, that fedora is as much a legacy as MPE’s endearing and enduring achievements. I have a short-brim hat I haven’t worn since the '90s. When fall teased us in Austin this month, I opened the windows here and started to clean out the office, tossing things into the Big Recycle Box. Coming from Depression Era hoarders, as I said in a ThrowBack Thursday article, I have way too much stuff in this office that oughta be in the recycle bin.