sesquipedality (
sesquipedality) wrote2013-10-28 12:44 pm
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Why I have stopped reading The Register
Back in the late '90s/early 2000's, The Register popped up as a breath of fresh air, with its irreverent reporting of IT and technology news. Today, after 15 years of using it a as a news source, I have removed it from my feed reader. I don't think it's likely to return, unless there is a major change of culture.
I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.
Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.
Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.

Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.
Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.
I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.
I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.
Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.
Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.

Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.
Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.
I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.
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(Anonymous) 2013-10-28 04:18 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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I spoke to a friend of mine (who writes for them (because they pay well and on time and this is rare in tech journalism)) about this recently; of course, he regularly has conversations with people who don't read El Reg anymore and has to slightly sheepishly admit he works for them.
Basically, they print Orlowski's trolling (and $FRIEND thinks it is basically trolling) because it gets page views. (I'm not trying to excuse this behaviour; I'm no more likely to read trolling than I am good-faith idiocy). Of course this does rather push away people like us.
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I'm actually inclined to view trolling on the subject of climate change as worse than good-faith idiocy. At least the idiots believe they're doing good, whereas someone who accepts that we're in the process of inducing a potential extinction event is knowingly and intentionally causing harm. "Deliberately contributing to unnecessary death and suffering on a massive scale" must be pretty close to the definition of evil, if the word means anything.
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