The constant worry of getting all the major players or pieces of the story covered. You never know if you're missing someone who is instrumental to the issue but just didn't come up during research or wasn't mentioned in other interviews.
Often these are the people who add the essential angle, or piece of history, to the story. One example might be doing a story on live cams without mentioning JenniCAM. Jenni wasn't the first, but she was instrumental in spreading the idea of live cams. If you don't mention this, your missing the story. Yet, when one researches live cams, nothing inherently leads one to JenniCAM, nor is everyone who operating these Cams able to explain how this trend started. Why would they? They just like the idea.
This dilemma is true in all of journalism of course, but is amplified by the Web's massive flatness. The Web really is a local community worldwide in scope, so you do have to burn a lot of shoe leather to get a full story, even if it is only the virtual kind.
Well, for the general writer entering into the field, I'd recommend "How Computers Really Work" by Milind S. Pandit on Osborne Books. It was published in 1993 and is already hard to find but you can still catch it in cutout bins and at libraries (Avoid confusing it with the ZD book on the same topic -- which is not nearly as good). It has been the best text I've read on how computers actually work -- starting from the electrons and scaling up to the operating system -- and it assumes very little prior knowledge.
Other than that, I would say any and everything else -- computer manuals, programming titles, Sociological treatises. It all fits together, and what you read in a "Learn C in 12 Minutes" or whatever may have some sort of usefulness down the road when you try to understand complicated issues elsewhere, say Y2K.
Assuming you mean as a tech writer for a general periodical:
- Obviously some basic computer science (though -- unless you're an Eric Raymond-- too much knowledge drowns the writer's prose in details of little interest to the avg. Joe)
- Data communications, because so much is happening between the ports these days, and because many telephony and Internet issues still are technologically -- rather than politically -- driven.
- A basic course in economics does wonders in distilling the reality from the hype.
- Politics, for as long as our elected officials see fit to regulate the industry and the participants.
- Design or aesthetics of some sort, for in the end it does come down to the end user.
- Literature would also be nice, if only for ideas on how to avoid the dreaded rut of doing product reviews every day.
- Journalism, of course, for the ground rules.
Me, I majored in psychology in college, so I'm pretty much trying to catch up on the lessons offered by all of the above.
Oddly enough, the most curious area of non-coverage by the Baltimore Sun, our town's daily, is the whole open source software movement of late, be it Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundations or Netscape's releasing of its code.
In fact, the word "Linux" has yet to never appear in any Sun editorial copy at all, if the Sun's search engine (and my memory) is to be of any indication.
I've covered it a couple of times and though I'm still on the fence as to whether the free software movement will eventually challenge the commercial side of things as its adherents so ardently believe, it is a story about people making conscious choices about doing things far differently than they are usually done in these parts. And there are Baltimore contingents to this movement.
Actually from my father, who was exploring all aspects of personal computing for years. Each time I'd visit, he'd have another tale, either about some computer game he was writing (back when there were magazines devoted to publish code for games) or about his adventures in replacing hardware, or about the intriguing existence of such things as "dark fiber."
Of course, upon picking up the finger puppet of technology that my Dad cast off (in favor of telling stories of his new country life, of all things), I found that it is the storyteller, not the story subject, that really holds the attention. And so my job is try to replicate that, however less effectively.
The database that compiles everything you've purchased using your grocery store savings club card.
Who knows if you've been buying condoms? Viagra? Rogaine?
Who knows that you've been eating too much fatty, greasy or carcinogenic foods?
If you use these cars, most every store will keep all this purchase information compiled. And there is nothing that stops them from selling it from your health insurance company -- and not telling you about it.
A lot more transparent.
The last few years were like the early '80s in pop music, when all these music groups hit it big with a cheap synth sounds, tinny drum machines and they actually had hit songs about telecommunications, science, clones and whatnot.
All that new technology was drawing attention to itself and it all sounded terribly dated a few years later, even as the technology itself went on to do greater good for pop music.
The Web is just slipping out of its self-conscious phase. (One of my Big Predictions is that people will eventually start looking at those fun irrelevant Web pages so prevalent a few years back -- "Find the Pope in the Porsche!" etc. -- as dated. "Oh that is so 1995," they will say.)
I don't know what the Web will look like, but I know it will be terribly useful and lead to lots of great entertainment and information, but will be as inherently interesting in and of itself as fax machines and telephone books are today. And I'll have to find a new source of beer money.
Copyright 1998, Thomas L. Mangan
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