PR and journalism

Verge ran a piece about Slack’s upcoming redesign.

Which is fine, as far as that goes. Since I use Slack every day for work, I read it.

But there’s something very odd about it. The whole thing reads like a fawning PR job rather than journalism. Slack is a bloated product, a resource-hogging electron app that may have made all of our workplaces a bit worse off.

We’re often judge by whether we have instant response, and if you don’t respond to something instantly, good luck finding it again — I’ve missed many messages this way.

Slack is also why a lot of teams decide not to keep documentation. Just search the Slack channel, bro.

And so looking at this piece, I wonder how much Slack paid Verge to write it, which is a rampant practice in tech “journalism”. And these same people that love Verge are also the ones frothing at the mouth over needing fact checkers peering over every shoulder and deeply concerned over fake news.