Used to be business & tech, now increasingly marginal
Written: Nov 29 '00 (Updated Jan 15 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Dot com drop has led mag into crapola
Cons: Still not cheap. Solid biz mags like Forbes have picked up tech smarts
The Bottom Line: I am considering cancelling my subscription after 4 years of reading. Content quality has seriously degraded.
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| scrum's Full Review: Red Herring Magazine |
I have subscribed to this magazine for 4 years now and have started to become more and more disappointed with every issue. It is supposed to be a technology magazine but from a business frame of view, it has increasingly become an investment magazine with trivial, biased articles. I suppose a lot of this is due to the .com crash and the fact that many readers are in that industry, but the magazine's quality of content has seriously slid in my opinion.
Now that the mainstream biz mags, like Forbes, Fortune, and papers, like the Financial Times and WSJ, have become increasingly tech smart, there is a decreasing need for RedHerring. Still, too many technology magazines forget about business entirely, leaving you often feeling that you would have been better off investing in Betamax over VHS (For those of you too young to know better, there used to be 2 formats for VCRs, and Beta lost despite "better" technology).
Whether biases have become too common or the writers are just not making efforts to investigate their subjects is still unclear. Either way, unfortunately many articles are becoming unapologetic promotion tools instead of reporting facts.
Increasingly, issues have become very, very thin. A lot of ads, little information, and that information is biased. Also, the problem with "tech" as a subject is that it covers so much: biotech, pc and server hardware, software, wireless, alternative computing, even energy now (fuel cells, &c.). Every issue is a dedicated issue which doesn't cover the state of the industry as much as promote specific smaller companies inside the industry. This causes even the focused issue concept to suffer, leaving very little of value in each months issue.
I am very seriously considering cancelling my subscription.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
scrum
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Location: Irvine, CA (Originally from Canada)
Reviews written: 21
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
31, married, professional, originally from Canada
Highly suspicious of Epinions members who "trust" everybody.
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