For well over a decade, the two most influential voices about consumer technology have been a sixty-six-year-old man who lives just outside of Washington, D.C. and a fifty-year-old man who resides in Westport, Connecticut. The former, Walt Mossberg, defined what it means to be a mainstream gadget reviewer when he started a weekly column, Personal Technology, for the Wall Street Journal, in 1991. The latter, David Pogue, began his column for the New York Times, State of the Art, in 2000. Every week, like a modern-day Prometheus handing down secret knowledge about arcane tools, they have dutifully informed millions of readers about the latest gadgets or services, and whether or not they are worth purchasing. Both of them will be gone soon: it was announced last month that Mossberg would leave the Journal at the end of the year, and Pogue revealed last week that he would be leaving the Times shortly.
Mossberg and his business partner, Kara Swisher, are creating a new media venture that builds off of their current Web site, All Things D, and its namesake conference, largely known for hosting memorable interviews with technology-industry leaders. (They are leaving the name behind with the Journal parent company Dow Jones.) Pogue is going to help Yahoo “build a new consumer-tech site,” where he’ll continue making the lovably goofy videos that have been a hallmark of his reviews. His departure from the Times follows a multiyear span of ethical controversies: his acceptance of a two-thousand-dollar hard-drive-recovery service, in 2005; the uneasy relationship between his product recommendations and books he sells, in 2009; “flagrantly violat[ing] the prohibition against giving advice at paid P.R. conferences,” in 2011; and, more recently, his marriage to an executive at OutCast, a tech-company-focussed public-relations firm whose clients include Amazon and Facebook. (Pogue has successfully defended his actions in each instance, though disclosures about his books were appended to relevant reviews, and his relationship with P.R. companies was more closely managed by the Times.)
The industry that that the two men cover, personal technology, has changed profoundly since they began their long tenures. A billion people are on Facebook, and more than half of all American adults own a smartphone. Even the phrase “personal technology” feels strangely old-fashioned; all relevant consumer technology is personal now, and “technology” seems three syllables too long. Tech has become so thoroughly mainstream, gadgets so completely commoditized, that over the past several years new tech products of the sort reviewed by their columns have begun to feel positively mundane to many—perhaps even to longtime readers, who have been steeped in technology for well over a decade. They are merely the state of now, not an enticing slice of the future. This is reflected in other media as well: the leading gadget blogs of the late aughts, Engadget and Gizmodo (where I worked for a number of years), whose rivalry was so intense that it merited a piece in Wired in 2008, are in the process of shifting their editorial coverage away from a relentless focus on gadgets; the former team behind Engadget, which now runs The Verge, is also looking beyond traditional tech coverage toward culture, science, and design.
The kind of technology guidance that consumers need today differs markedly from what they needed in 2006. The hard technology choices of that time have been rendered fundamentally uninteresting by basic technological progress: cheap, good HDTVs abound, an MP3 player is simply an app, and few would even consider owning a digital camera other than the one on their smartphone. Guidance on which pieces of boring but necessary technology to buy—the routers and speakers and headphones—is increasingly better suited to being supplied by deep research and data from specialists, rather than from generalists, much like you’d look to Consumer Reports to tell you which toaster is best for bagels.
The most meaningful personal-tech decisions left for the average person to make, about which phones, tablets, and laptops to buy, are less easily contained within the construct of a rote product review. All three of the major consumer-computer companies—Apple, Google, and Microsoft—now produce wholly integrated computers. They design and build the devices, the software that runs on them, and the services that connect them to the rest of the world. What people are choosing is less an iPhone 5s over a Moto X than an entire digital ecosystem that surrounds and permeates their life, and which will affect every other piece of technology that they buy. Not only are these decisions becoming more divorced from the traditional product cycle—it’s increasingly difficult for reviewers to fully evaluate these ecosystems as they grow deeper, more personalized, and more dependent on the technologies used by someone’s social circle; a reviewer who, along with his family and his friends, primarily uses Microsoft devices and services probably won’t have an optimal experience of Google Now.
The questions that consumers face, in other words, are less about what to buy than about how to live. It’s not a matter of which social network or search engine or photo-sharing service to use; it’s who you should friend on Facebook, the best way to Google, and whether or not you should use filters on your Instagram photos.
The point, ultimately, is that there is more need than ever for regular technology criticism in two of the most important newspapers in the country—but it needs to be deeper than, and different from, what Pogue and Mossberg did. There can be beauty in aluminum, glass, and polycarbonate; art in the design of software; and elegance in coding. Or ugliness and chaos. These are rarely, if ever, meaningfully captured in newspaper technology criticism, in the way that, for instance, James Fallows critiqued the productivity software Agenda, or Anthony Lane reviewed the English Poetry Full-Text Database. This is despite the fact that there must be a greater audience than ever—a very mainstream one—for the kind of technology criticism that the Web pioneer Dave Winer seeks, which provides “perspective on what I’ve seen, and more to think about,” much like a movie, book, or any other cultural artifact.
Both the Journal and the Times are looking to replace the positions held by Mossberg and Pogue. The Journal’s global technology editor, Jonathan Krim, wrote in an e-mail that the paper is “actively talking to candidates” to replace Mossberg as a regular gadget reviewer, and that it “intend[s] to give a lot of visibility to personal tech reviews and news.” The Times did not respond to a request for a comment, but it is currently evaluating replacements for Pogue. They would both do well to reconsider what, precisely, it now means to review “personal technology.”
Above: David Pogue in August, 2013. Photograph by Frederick M. Brown/Getty.
