Access, Accountability Reporting and Silicon Valley

The lines are blurring, in some cases dramatically, between what it means to be a media company and what it means to be a technology firm. The leaders of some websites with robust newsrooms, like BuzzFeed, even refer to themselves as tech companies first, journalism organizations second. Cash-rich media start-ups and at least one legacy newspaper, The Washington Post, are owned by titans of tech.

Silicon Valley’s leaders aren’t uniformly champions of the press, however. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, poured $10 million of his own money into the lawsuit that eventually bankrupted Gawker Media Group last spring. The Gawker-Thiel showdown was a dispute in its own right, but it can also be viewed as a microcosm of the broader tension between media companies and technology companies, a relationship so strained that, as Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker, the journalism industry should be readying itself for a “protracted war.” Against this backdrop, tech reporting presents one of the most profound accountability challenges in modern journalism. Who is best served by the coverage we have? And is it the coverage we deserve and need?