I'm a historian by training. The first thing you learn is the hierarchy of sources. Primary sources — first-hand accounts, original documents, directtestimony — are the raw material. Secondary sources are someone else's interpretation of that material. The further you get from the primary, the moredistortion accumulates. Every layer of interpretation is another opportunity for error, agenda, or omission.
The methodology for interrogating a source is called hermeneutics: who wrote this, from what position, with what access, for what audience? Primary sources are the easiest to apply it to. You're working with the raw material. Secondary sources require you to run that analysis twice — once for the original, once for the interpreter.
This is why I haven't read a tech section of a major newspaper in years.
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The Practitioner Is the Primary Source
Jeff Snover invented PowerShell. He blogs about AI architecture. When he publishes something, that's a primary source — a practitioner's first-hand account, applying decades of domain expertise to a problem he's actually working on. Dave Farley builds CI/CD pipelines and wrote the book on continuous delivery. Martin Fowler has been in the trenches of software architecture for thirty years. Rich Hickey designed Clojure. John Savill lives inside Azure infrastructure daily. Scott Hanselman has been shipping software and writing about the craft publicly for over two decades.
These people are not commenting on technology. They are making it.
The Washington Post tech section is a journalist — likely a generalist — interpreting what these people said, filtered through an editorial desk optimizing for clicks, simplified for an audience assumed to know nothing.
I'd rather read the territory than the map.
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It's Not Just Technology, I go deep on shallow entertainment
Taylor won Big Brother Season 24. Her channel Big Brother Unlocked gives commentary on the show from someone who actually played it and won — the strategy, the social dynamics, what production doesn't show you. No recap journalist has that access. Laowhy lived in China for over a decade; his China Show is first-hand observation of a place most Western reporters parachute into for a week. Sam on NotSam covers professional wrestling as an industry insider with relationships and context no sports desk has. His commentary is so good, that I violate his number 1 rule to watch the content. I scratch my wrestling itch just by Sam passionately covering the storylines.
And of course my favorite, "Rob Has a Podcast" for all my Survivor news.
In every domain I follow, the signal comes from people with direct experience working in public. They're not harder to find than the newspaper. They're easier — a subscription, an RSS feed, a Friday bookmark.
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The Curation Argument Is Circular
The only real defense of curated news is time. You can't read everything, so someone surfaces what matters.
But it collapses under pressure. If I don't have the time or interest to engage with a topic at the primary level, why am I reading someone else's summary of it? A summary doesn't give me expertise. It gives me the feeling of being informed — enough for a dinner party opinion, not enough to actually think about the issue.
If I care about a topic, I find the primary sources. If I don't care enough to find them, I also don't care enough to need the summary. The curation model serves a middle state: caring just enough to want the feeling of staying current, but not enough to do the work. I'm not sure that's worth optimizing for.
The practitioner has a microphone now. The primary source is one search away.
So who's still reading the newspaper?