I'm pretty comfortable with the technical competence of a subset of tech journalists -- nikcub is one of them. Other fields often get fairly competent journalists; tech journalism deserves the same.
The key thing here isn't necessarily technical competence but skepticism, which is the thing journalists are supposed to be oversupplied with.
> Other fields often get fairly competent journalists;
That's... not really true, especially when it comes to stuff like Bitcoin, which even a lot of experts don't understand (remember, people in our field are still struggling to write CRUD web apps). Medicine, for example, has equally complicated areas (cancer, epidemiology). I can't speak from personal experience (I'm not an expert in that field) but I have friends who are medical researchers and they are equally frustrated with medical journalism.
Ultimately, what we need are people who are actual experts in fields to be writing about those fields for a general audience, and get rid of journalists who aren't experts.
One thing that medicine does better is regulation. With odd exceptions like abortion, regulation of how doctors do their jobs is managed by other doctors. I would love if that was how things were done in computer fields.
The thing about journalism is you don't need all of them to be good, or even the median or mean journalist to be good -- just the top few to be amazing.
I agree -- we need people who are actual experts in the field, but also good at communicating, when communicating about topics where expertise is valuable. There are some amazing war correspondent journalists who go into harm's way and have both shared experience and a reasonable background.
I like NPR, but what I like about them is usually that they ask a question and get out of the way so the expert can talk. That means that you hear what the expert wants to say on the topic, which is great. But the expert doesn't get to choose the topic, and unless they're particularly assertive, the expert usually doesn't tell us when the question isn't really relevant, or when a better question could be asked. They're great, and I agree about donating to NPR, but I think journalists who were actually experts in the fields they reported on would be able to do better.
