Technology is a huge part of the contemporary American story and economy. According to statistical data analyst Statista, in 2023 alone, the U.S. tech sector contributed nearly $2 trillion to the country’s overall gross domestic product (GDP). The tech space is broad and sweeping, with tentacles that stretch into virtually every other industry. It’s hard to imagine any business or job that isn’t influenced by technological innovation today. And Americans, as individuals and as a collective culture, are tech-obsessed. Regarding tech, there’s never a shortage of news.
Dispatches from the Pacific Northwest
“GeekWire started in 2011, but the roots go back much further than that. My colleague John Cook and I met as reporters at the Seattle Post Intelligencer in the early 2000s,” Todd Bishop said. “John was covering venture capital and startups, and I was covering Microsoft and doing the daily beat reporting for the newspaper. We realized it was a little like a chocolate and peanut butter situation. The two go really well together.”
With the help of a local angel investor — Jonathan Sposato, who serves as chairman — they launched GeekWire. Bishop is a senior writer and co-founder; Cook is a co-founder and publisher.
“The premise was that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest deserve a national and international tech news site of their own. Our motto is: What happens here matters everywhere,” Bishop said.
With two of the largest cloud companies, Amazon and Microsoft, based in the Pacific Northwest, cloud technology has been a hot coverage topic. Recently, AI became top-of-mind for the newsroom, led by Editor Taylor Soper.
“One of the things we’ve been tracking closely, or as much as we can, is the changing influence of technology in Washington, D.C. — and technology leadership, in particular,” Bishop said. “The inauguration is just one example where we saw a certain selection of tech executives. In some ways, I think [they were] people who represented technology writ large with Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. … It’s fascinating to see just how integral tech is as part of the national conversation. It feels like data centers and AI capacity have become the prize for the Trump administration in much the same way manufacturing facilities had been in Trump’s first term.”
Tech is also front and center at statehouses. Bishop pointed to Washington state, where the governor assembled a data center task force to look at the tradeoffs of expanding data centers — their impact on energy and the environment.
When hiring tech reporters, Bishop said they look for candidates who have experience in general business reporting — journalists who are comfortable sifting through P&L statements and SEC filings — and also for great storytellers who can communicate complex things in simple, engaging ways.
“Kurt Schlosser on our team is great at talking about the cultural aspect of tech; we call it ‘geek life.’ Lisa Stiffler, another person on our team, is someone we worked with at the Seattle Post Intelligencer. She’s extremely good at the scientific angles,” Bishop said.
GeekWire’s audience values competitive intelligence. They seek insight into startups, personnel moves, what’s happening with funding and investors, and where the ripe tech business opportunities may be.
GeekWire hosts various events throughout the year — conferences and summits, award ceremonies and other gatherings that bring together as many as 700 people. “We think of the content events as live journalism on stage,” Bishop said.
Perhaps one of the best things about being a tech reporter is having access to an array of new technologies and — playing with them. Last year, Bishop conducted an at-home experiment using an AI app from a local developer GeekWire was reporting on. He used their AI technology to control traffic coming in and out of his home through a cat door. It could distinguish between the family pet and unwelcome raccoons.
“We have the most fun when we’re able to be creative,” Bishop said. “We have this thing called GeekWire Adventures. It’s experiential reporting. For example, Taylor, our editor, went out for a few weekends a few years ago to try to be an Amazon driver. They have a program called Flex. It’s kind of like Uber for packages. … So, he was a citizen Amazon driver and wrote about it. It was one of our most successful stories we’ve done to shine a light on what the experience is really like.”
Making Platformer and Hard Fork
After Casey Newton graduated from Northwestern University with his journalism degree, he landed his first reporting job at a newspaper in northwest Indiana, where he was assigned to city government. He later moved to Arizona and covered city government in Scottsdale and Phoenix — and ultimately covered state government — for The Arizona Republic. However, Newton always had an affinity for technology, so when he was recruited to write about tech for the San Francisco Chronicle, he seized the opportunity.
He subsequently reported for CNET and then was a senior editor at The Verge, where he began writing a daily tech newsletter and columns. “A lot of my peers in the press subscribed to it. A lot of comms people who worked at the companies I was covering subscribed to it. … I remember when Mark Zuckerberg subscribed to it! … And then COVID hit.”
During the pandemic, Newton recalled feeling isolated working from home. There was no newsroom to head to, no meetings, no travel. But it gave him the time to contemplate his professional future. He wanted to produce his own journalism and get more involved in business operations — a side of news publishing journalists aren’t often privy to. He wanted to see if he could build something sustainable and make good money while doing it.
So, he founded Platformer, a daily tech title that primarily reports on social networks.
“Some of these companies have become the richest and most powerful companies the world has ever seen,” Newton said.
“When Facebook first got into the realm of billions of users, we had people pointing out that Facebook might actually have more users than the Catholic Church, which was previously thought to be the biggest institution in the world,” Newton said. “These were just giant new things.”
“Right now, I spend a lot of time writing about AI companies. AI companies are small compared to Google or Meta — in terms of the number of users, revenue and employees. They’re small by the standards of the behemoths, but they’re also massively consequential.”
AI is the biggest story in tech today, Newton asserted, “particularly, how fast it’s improving. A lot of people may have tried ChatGPT six months or a year ago, and it was still making a lot of mistakes. It didn’t seem that useful. The technology is getting better really quickly, and it’s now performing about as good as a human being on a handful of tasks,” he said.
“That handful of tasks is just going to get bigger, and it’s going to introduce all sorts of important and tricky debates around: How do you manage a technology that is better than human beings at certain things? How do you account for the possible loss of many jobs through automation? How do you protect against the risks of this technology being used to develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons? There’s a whole set of tough questions that come out of AI. But I should also say that I think AI can be and will be used for good.”
In 2022, Newton partnered with New York Times Tech Columnist Kevin Roose on a podcast — “Hard Fork.”
“I’ve been convinced that anybody who does a newsletter should also have a podcast because, to me, they seem very complementary,” Newton said.
He spoke about platform differences: “Text is basically unmatched. It’s really good for thoughtful analysis and for making one cogent point. Podcasts, on the other hand, are great for conversation. They can be an amazing vehicle to deliver an interview. And I also think it’s a way to humanize journalism.”
“The most important thing about a podcast is the way it makes you feel. … With ‘Hard Fork,’ it’s really important to me that people feel good at the end of listening to it,” he said.
Asked if his previous work covering government prepared him for reporting on tech, Newton reflected, “I think one thing I took from that was that I’m a civic-minded person. I care about how people and places are governed, and I also expect that the people I’m writing about will not always be 100% honest with me. There is diplomacy to politics, sometimes involving shading the truth or not telling the truth altogether. My inheritance from my time covering government was a kind of skepticism.
“At first, to be honest with you, I did not find that [skepticism] useful when I began writing about tech, because the tech industry was much smaller then, and it just didn’t feel as consequential as today. But over time, the people I wrote about started to feel much like heads of state rather than the CEOs of 30 or 40 years ago. That’s when I suddenly found all those old political reporter muscles reactivating,” he said.
The other thing that’s served him well as a tech reporter and media entrepreneur is authenticity. “I really love technology. I like using technology. I like trying new things when they come out. I like meeting the people who made those things. I like writing about the policies to ensure that people use them well. And I think this has given me an advantage over a lot of other reporters,” he said.
“I feel blessed as a reporter — that I love what I write about and I just kind of want to do it for my whole career,” he said.
Gretchen A. Peck is a contributing editor to Editor & Publisher. She's reported for E&P since 2010 and welcomes comments at gretchenapeck@gmail.com.
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