John Markoff

By Don Monroe

October 15, 2003

As West Coast correspondent for the New York Times specializing in technology issues, John Markoff is often the first to learn of innovations that will revolutionize the technology of the future.

Or not.

The challenge of technology reporting is to find the first fragile seedlings of important concepts and trends amid truckloads of self promotion and hype that are deposited on the field every year. Markoff is widely respected for his ability to spot and explain trends for readers of the Times before they are generally recognized.

“The important thing about Markoff is that he doesn't just get the scoop. He gets the scoop behind the scoop. He tells us about something we didn't know was happening, then goes down another layer to what it means in the larger context,” said Paul Saffo, director of Institute for the Future, on the Edge Foundation website.

Because of his high visibility, companies often offer Markoff exclusive access to a story in advance of its public announcement. Their hope is that his coverage will leverage their press release, usually released the same day, to generate widespread attention by reporters who might otherwise have been too timid.

For example, at the time of a recent telephone interview, Markoff was entertaining a possible exclusive from a major technology company poised to enter an already vibrant market outside of its traditional line.

A guaranteed scoop, with time to do background research, makes for very attractive offer. But the reporter must be wary of acting – or appearing to act –as an extension of the company's public relations arm. Markoff said he was “uncomfortable” with such exclusive arrangements, but “sometimes,” he said, “it's necessary.”

A further complication arises if a reporter agrees to an exclusive, but later finds the story to be less than it appeared. While Markoff said he would pull such a story in this case, he did not recall any examples where he had done so. “I try to do enough due diligence” before agreeing to do an exclusive so this can be avoided, he said.

In his current case, Markoff's diligence suggested that while this company might indeed have an important impact on this market, the announcement of its intention to do so did not justify coverage in the Times . “We have to decide what's important for our readers to see. We don't have company-by-company coverage teams like the Wall Street Journal.”   The more general readership of the Times requires him to be more selective, he said: “I see myself as a filter. What you don't see is as important as what you see.”

Dealing with Silicon Valley technology firms requires special care. “All of the companies out here have huge operations in public relations,” he said. Nonetheless, he tolerates the presence of PR representatives in interviews, saying he had “given up struggling against the system.” Sometimes, the PR reps actually learn something they didn't know during the interview. Overall, he said, “I regard my relationship with PR people as basically adversarial,” although good ones can be very helpful. With regard to the openness of the technical experts, Markoff feels that it depends primarily on the personality of the expert, whose expansiveness varies widely, and not very much on the presence of PR people.

Markoff clearly feels comfortable with the game, and does not see himself as easily manipulated. This also applies to using non-technical explanations or metaphors provided with a press release. “Most technical people are not very good at packaging their work for the general public. When I come across a good one, I don't mind using it.” Markoff quoted Fred Andrews, a former business editor at the Times , that for complex technical issues, reporters should aim to provide the “illusion of understanding,” hopefully without distorting the underlying reality.

When it comes to quotes from press releases, however, the situation is quite different. “I almost never use provided quotes,” Markoff said. “ Maybe if it's a CEO and I don't have access to them.” Instead he tries to get access to the engineers and scientists directly. Use of a provided quote is a “failure,” and it should always be identified.

Overall, Markoff estimated that about half of his published articles were “enterprise” stories, generated from his own initiative and his sources, and about half were inspired by formal external inquiries.

Markoff came to the New York Times in 1988 from the San Francisco Examiner. Following standard Times procedure, he spent his first four years in New York, getting immersed in the paper's culture before returning to San Francisco. Prior to that, he had worked at Byte magazine, written a column on Personal Computers at the San Jose Mercury, and served at Infoworld magazine, starting in 1981.

Obviously, someone who was already writing about PCs when IBM introduced their defining version in 1981 does not come to technology reporting by accident. Markoff admitted to being a technology aficionado, and said it definitely helped him to get an honest story from technologists he interviews. “I'm enough of a geek,” to get sources talking about the technical issues, Markoff said, “as long as I'm not over my depth.” He added that these discussions work well “as long as people are not in the corporate setting,” which suggests that the role of PR-orchestrated interviews may be more constrained than he would like to admit.

Nonetheless, Markoff has an enviable record of identifying trends early. For example, he is credited as one of the first to highlight the World Wide Web, as it emerged from the sheltered nursery of universities and defense laboratories. Some of Markoff's New York Times Headlines from 1993 include “E-mail Is Becoming A Cheap-Fax Network,” “Cult Film Is a First On Internet,” “Turning the Desktop PC Into a Talk Radio Medium,” “A New Information Mass Market.” In the last article, he quotes Stephen Wolff, director of the network division of the National Science Foundation: "People are just beginning to realize the implications of the fact that anything can be digitized.   The Internet is the universal communications medium of the future."

None of these ideas seem very surprising today, but when these articles were written a year before Netscape was introduced in October 1994 they were completely novel.

After such successes, pressure to “hype” new developments “is the reality of the game,” Markoff said. He added that while the pressure from editors is “not too bad,” it is true that “the currency of the New York Times is the front page.”

Inevitably, Markoff's coverage has the potential to influence a company's stock price. But, he says, “I don't even think about it. I'm basically a technology guy.”

As one of the early observers of the World Wide Web, Markoff found the later dot-com boom –   now called a bubble – troubling. “I hate pack journalism,” he declared, referring to the breathless coverage of startups with lots of funding to do something that was “basically boring.” Markoff is still out looking for the next big thing. He shows little interest in last decade's companies that built the internet. “Do we cover plumbing?” he asked rhetorically? “That's what Cisco basically is: a plumbing company.”

John Markoff has no intention of covering plumbing.