Chapter 9: Spinners, Hacks and Hype

Tech - never knowingly undersold

This chapter is about how tech companies have often oversold their products, employing an army of PR people to unleash a tidal wave of hype which swamps the inboxes of tech journalists.

It starts with the story of Spinvox, which in 2009 was one of the UK’s hottest young tech companies, using artificial intelligence to convert voicemails into text - or so it claimed. But when a whistleblower came to me and showed me that the messages were in fact being transcribed by hundreds of call-centre workers in Egypt and other countries outside Europe, things quickly began to fall apart.

We go through several other examples of where hype failed to match up with reality, and end with a discussion about the PR industry and its relationship with journalists, who are increasingly outnumbered - one American survey showed there were more than 4 PR agents to every reporter. Faced with everything from the Steve Jobs reality-distortion field to well-funded start-ups boasting of groundbreaking innovations how good a job are journalists doing in giving the public an accurate picture?

Here’s an extract from the chapter;

So who is to blame for this: the spinners, the businesses that employ them, or the journalists who swallow their stories? I convened a couple of my friends in PR to discuss this. Let’s not use their real names – they hope to continue their long and successful careers which have seen them represent major American and European technology companies both for external agencies and in-house. So I will call them Jane and Patrick.

Jane sympathized with me about the tidal wave of nonsense that arrives in my inbox. ‘I really feel journalists are just bombarded with crap, basically.’ But she pinned the blame not on the agencies but on their clients. Too many tech company bosses just didn’t understand the media – ‘There’s a quite staggering level of media illiteracy.’ As a veteran of the industry, she now had the confidence to push back against ‘executives who are trying to get me and my team to come to people like you with what I would say are weak or bad stories.’

Patrick, who started off as a newspaper journalist, felt too many young fresh-faced PR people at agencies were ‘just not experienced enough or investing the time to get up to speed before they actually pick up the phone to journalists.’ Mind you, he also thought that 20 years ago there was a smaller, more specialist band of reporters – ‘proper hardcore tech journalists’ – who really knew their stuff and could not have the wool pulled over their eyes.

Both look on with a mixture of admiration and horror at the Apple PR operation, and its iron discipline at getting its message across. ‘The media have partly created that beast,’ said Patrick, ‘and actually have given them an easy ride.’ I remarked just what a challenge it is to get anything out of Apple. I once spent months negotiating to get an interview with the chief executive, Tim Cook, at a major product launch. While we had never had an interview with Steve Jobs’ successor, the signs were hopeful. But a couple of weeks before the event I was called in to Apple’s London office to be told that an exclusive had been granted to the anchor of one of the American nightly news programmes.

To my horror, I watched his folksy piece begin with him actually hugging Tim Cook as he came off stage after unveiling the new product. Not a sequence I could ever imagine in a British television news piece.

Jane,  who spent much of her career at another giant American tech firm, acknowledged that there is a cultural difference between US and British journalists, which makes it hard for her to persuade executives to engage with the likes of me. ‘They see you guys as cynical, negative, out to embarrass or trip people up. And they don’t necessarily see that the benefit of engaging is worth the potential cost of engaging.’

Jane and Patrick both understood why there had been a ‘techlash’: a revolt against the tech companies, and their belief that they were ushering in a new borderless utopia where local laws were of little relevance. ‘There was a reckoning needed,’ said Jane. ‘There’s a dreadful arrogance in this industry.’

As I turn into a grumpy old man, I get ever more exasperated by some of the outpourings of the PR industry, notably the emails from people who have obviously never read the BBC News website offering us “op-eds” or “authored pieces” from their clients. Nevertheless, I have good friends in PR, people like Jane and Patrick who have a real understanding of how a newspaper or a TV newsroom works, often because they have worked in journalism before heading to “the dark side”.

What I have never accepted is the cosy idea that we are all on the same side. Their job is to paint the tech industry and its products in the best possible light, while ours is to explain this world to our audiences, while retaining a certain critical distance.

The next chapter - and the next post in this newsletter - is about a tech industry that has been constantly in the news lately and represents the apotheosis of hype. Look out for that in your inbox later this week.

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