News flash: You didn’t.

We blogged it during the day, and wrote about it in-depth in print. Not for the first time, either. This kind of continuous coverage is something we and a lot of news organizations are doing quite a lot of these days. We’re not afraid to break news online, or even in our blogs.

Really, you should check it out. Things have changed quite a bit in the last few years.

The other major problem with your post is your assumption that because you aren’t getting anything out of our coverage then no one is. Hate to break it to you, but not everyone is as breathlessly excited about the iPhone SDK as you are (or I am). And those people who are interested in technology, but aren’t likely to run out and buy a book on Objective-c and Xcode are the folks who look to us.

We aren’t trying to out-CNET CNET because our audience *would* tune out if we did that. People (quite a large number of them, in fact) turn to the Times for a certain kind of tech coverage. And this is something we do quite well, and I see no reason we should stop doing it well.

That is our niche, Pat.

I’ve argued that point before. Maybe I should have made this post a little more clear. I just don’t want to see news in a print edition that Apple released an iPhone SDK yesterday. I knew they were releasing it yesterday for about a month, and I followed it live. What a newspaper can give me is analysis to what this means for the iPhone, the mobile market and for users.

The iFund, to me, is the bigger story. Are devices like the iPhone really going to be bigger than the PC? Are we about to user in an era of having a PC in everyone’s pocket? $100,000,000 in a venture capital fund is huge for what many people thought was “just another gadget.”

@John and @Patrick - I think national newspapers still have a role to play, if they are willing to play it. They too need to get leaner and more focused, but brands like the Post and Times can be major national players. Brand identity is very difficult to create, and they have it in spades. They are in many ways the ESPN and SIs of national and international news.

Does it make sense for the Times to try to compete with CNET on tech news? I don’t know. Without David Pogue they would have nothing, but they have him, which keeps them competitive.

But I think the important point here is that most papers are not the Times or the Post (I’m looking at you LA Times). Just because you are a big paper doesn’t mean you have a big national reach.

Actually, I think print newspapers need to focus more on providing that in-depth analysis. This would give readers an incentive to read about events such as the iPhone SDK the day after.

@John…

National papers have a huge role in online news. Not only do they have a great brand — nytimes.com, washingtonpost.com, usatoday.com — they also have the infrastructure to manage it. Can’t say that about any startup!