The newspaper effect

 

If you've ever been an eyewitness to a newsworthy event, it's always interesting to read the description of the event in the newspaper the next day. It's almost always the case that what you read doesn’t quite match the events that you witnessed. It might be the case that your memory isn't very accurate. That seems to often be the case after stressful situations, for example.

Another explanation is that the facts were distorted through numerous retellings before they reached the journalist. This is much like what happens in the game of "telephone" that children often play in school, in which a message gets badly distorted after being whispered around the room from child to child. So even if journalists are doing their best to get the facts right, by the time the message reaches them it may have been changed quite a bit, and this version may be the one that gets in print.

On the other hand, when we read in the newspaper about events that we weren't present at, we naturally assume that the printed version is accurate. After all, if it's in the newspaper, it must be accurate, right? This is what I call the "newspaper effect," and it may make us much too trusting of some information. So don't take for granted that everything that you read is true, and certainly don't base your IT strategies on it without double-checking the information for accuracy.

Much of the information that journalists get about the IT market comes from people at IT companies. Their point of view is far from being impartial, and they're unlikely to give an unbiased view of the market and the strengths and weaknesses of their products. And because journalists are as pressed for time as the rest of us, they often don't have the time to check each and every fact that they get from such sources. This has led to many IT companies having an unprecedented ability to influence the perception of both them and their products, and can sometimes make it difficult to distinguish between marketing hype and real journalism.

Back in the dot-com boom, for example, PKI technology was widely reported to be an important technology, and one that every CIO should be including in their strategic plans. Because this was so widely written about, almost nobody questioned this assumption. At the same time that PKI was being described as a vital technology, user experiences with the technology were less than adequate, and it has been estimated that over half of PKI products purchased were never actually deployed because it was simply too hard and expensive to use.

For some unexplained reason, the stories about PKI failing didn’t get the same level of coverage as the stories about how it was a vital part of any organization’s plans. The result was millions of dollars wasted on technology that turned out to be relatively useless. The newspaper effect is at least partially to blame for this. Many people who should have known better believed what they read, and didn’t think to question its accuracy.

Don’t fall into this trap. Look for reliable data to support claims that you see about any new technologies. That data is almost always available somewhere. It just may be very hard to find.