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John Biggs

TechForReporters - Reporters and technologists helping each other

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TechForReporters is a place where reporters can ask hard questions. Nearly every story is a tech story these days and reporters need quick, accurate answers. Technologists - programmers, engineers, designers, and thinkers - can answer in an anonymous or open forum. It is currently free.

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John Biggs
Maker
Hey, Guys, It's John Biggs. I've written for the New York Times, Gizmodo, and TechCrunch and I always got frustrated because reporters never had the chance to truly understand tech. Now, if they have a specific question, they can simply go over to TechForReporters and ask anonymously and privately. This isn't Quora or Stackoverflow. This is the site you use if you have a question about the Dark Web and want a candid answer or if you have a trove of emails and need help parsing them. I'm also asking technologists to help out by setting the record straight. I know how dumb I can be on some topics when I write about them so I need your help. I'm sure others do as well.
Moovy
@johnbiggs very great Idea. We have the perfect product for all these technologists around the world or even the reporters! We should cooperate.🤝
David Carpe
@johnbiggs great idea - wonder if you get the team at IRE.org to endorse this alongside their old CAR initiatives and the tip sheets resources - if you have a revenue plan, i suspect that they will balk -but if the goal is support of journalism, they'll be all over it (hopefully)
Jói Sigurdsson
@johnbiggs Hey John, this is very cool, I've signed up as a technologist and answered my first question. Would be great if linebreaks were preserved for basic formatting :) Love the idea of this platform.
Eric García
Maker
@joisig We'll release this formatting and other fixes soon :)
Eric García
Maker
@johnbiggs @joisig Fixed and on production :D
Alex Williams
Shared this with The New Stack editorial team. Looking forward to seeing this resource develop. Needed to help reporters better explain what they are writing about.
Eric García
Maker
@alexwilliams Thanks Alex! We're working hard on fixing bugs and add more interesting features
Sarthak Grover
Excellent idea @johnbiggs ! Reminds me of the ELI5 posts on Reddit which I still find quite useful. One challenge, specially for journalism - How much do you trust the information you get from these sources? Are there some kind of verified-credentials (like LinkedIN profile included) that are required of the folks who respond or do you expect the community to police itself (much like Wikipedia)?
Ana Milicevic
@johnbiggs @sarthakgrover I 2nd Sarthak's kudos & question on trust. It's positively infuriating to see outright charlatans being frequently quoted in top-shelf publications. This strikes me as the type of community that could enable folks who are underrepresented in media coverage to thrive and really get recognition for their expertise.
victor marks
I have high hopes for this, reporters need all the help they can get to represent tech accurately!
Eric García
Maker
@vmarks Go ahead and ask your questions, there are actually many sources who signed up already! :) Enjoy!
Gary Ma
I like the concept of bringing these two together like this. @johnbriggs how would you describe this differs from HARO?
John Biggs
Maker
Not sure if @Johnbriggs has an opinion @thegaryma but this is different from haro because it's focused on tech only and assumes technologists can help with programming and other things, not just sourcing. I want all reporters to have the tools necessary to manage their information.
Gary Ma
@johnbiggs Lol. I'd blame it on auto-correct but this time was my bad. Thanks for the clarification.
Jose Aguirre
Sound good !!
Product Pearson
This concept is very, very interesting to me. I do a lot of voluntary tech work (Google Top Contributor, did a big Quora stint before leaving due to spam), and would love to check this out.
Chris Guest
Journalism is a good initial use case, but I also like the idea of a general amnesty on questions. A safe space for all those questions you feel you should know answers to by now, but we're too afraid to ask. This is also needed in other fields adjacent to tech, such as the areas of ad tech and martech that are overflowing with vendors and jargon, and CMO's are struggling to keep up with the topics they are expected to know.
@ChuckReynolds
wow super beta huh? cool idea. signed up and answered a question already. Filtering by 'tag' doesn't seem to work and search only links to broken urls but seems like a cool idea.
Volhan Salai
Maker
@chuckreynolds working on solving all problems with it, we first wanted to hear some feedback and improve the site according to it
Eric García
Maker
@chuckreynolds Thanks for your feedback Chuck! We're working hard on all of this and more features will be coming!
Josef Richter
Fake news! :D
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