David Pogue and Yahoo's "Normals" Problem

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a keynote talk at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, David Pogue (Yahoo's freshly minted technology columnist) suggested that the new 'Yahoo Tech' Website — a key part of the company's latest rebranding — would be targeted at 'normal' people as opposed to 'gearheads.' Based on a map that flashed on the giant screen behind him, which showed the 'normals' clustered in the middle of the country and the 'gearheads' restricted to the coasts, it's clear that Yahoo has embraced a divisive strategy that tries to equate Yahoo's brands with some sort of mythical 'middlebrow' audience that exists within clearly defined borders. (During his presentation, Pogue also flashed a slide that made fun of competing tech-news brands: The Verge was rendered as 'The Urge,' for example, while Gizmodo became 'Gizmoody.') The problem is that rigid audience of 'normals' doesn't exist, at least not in the way that Yahoo envisions. Large numbers of well-educated technology consumers — 'gearheads,' in Pogue's parlance — exist all over the country; to say otherwise is like suggesting that Wyoming is 100 percent Republican, or that everybody who lives in Florida hates snow. In other words, Yahoo's approach to tech content isn't merely schismatic; it's willfully unaware of the variety that exists among technology fans."

What do you expect?

[jddeluxe]

Anything but douchery from David Pogue?

Site Dilution

[edibobb]

Yahoo Tech is going the route of site dilution, in which each site eventually dumbs down to something in between Gawker, Huff Post, and Fox News. The sites post the same inane, inaccurate stories, such as "supervolcanoes imminent". Uh oh... wasn't that on /. ?

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe most of those comments are paid by Republican think tanks. If they can skew the discussion to a far right as possible, over time, you will mold the reader's left vs right barometer.

Re:Just catering to their demographics

[timeOday]

I just googled the Rolling Stone article [rollingstone.com] you alluded to, and I admit it is more leftist than I expected to see. That said, the pendulum swings back and forth. The people pushing the policies leading to todays out-of-control inequality should have looked at some history themselves, and the traction that outright communism was gaining after the Great Depression until some fairly mild measures in that direction (the New Deal) were adopted. Boomers enjoyed the benefits without acknowledging them, and dismantled them (through inadequate funding) in order to line their own pockets, at the expense of the millenials. Now the pendulum is going to swing back a bit. But we aren't going to become the USSR, regardless of anything Rolling Stone says.