"The skills, knowledge, experience, and access it takes to be a knowledgeable authority in a technical field has many appealing (and more lucrative) opportunities than writing, so tech writing/reporting/reviewing may always tend to be someone’s side project. That’s fine, but it probably results in less information, less quality information, less independent information with a minimum of entanglements in business interests."

And here lies the rub. To attract tech journalists with some institutional memory requires paying what few Internet websites can afford. This means only a few reliable tech news sources will exist. The remainder will use writers willing to work for a fraction of the amount. Since they will make up the preponderance of the verbiage, audiences will use them to gauge the professionalism of tech reporting, only accelerating the downward spiral until we reach the current state of affairs.