I hate to pick on someone — unless they deserve it, of course — but I’m willing to make an exception in Lance Ulanoff’s case. He’s the PCMag editor whose piece on Facebook got picked up by Fox News, primarily (I’m assuming) because of the headline, which says “Facebook’s death spiral has begun.” The actual column is a sort of drive-by critique of the social network, in which Ulanoff cobbles together reports about how it used to be hard to quit Facebook, and about how it had some problems with the news feed back in 2006, and about how it reminds him of America Online back in the day. Sounds like a death spiral, doesn’t it?
When I finished reading the piece, I checked the byline to see who wrote it, and the name Ulanoff rang a bell. Then I remembered: Lance is the same guy who wrote a piece about digital-rights management and music not that long ago, which I also wrote a post about and called “staggeringly dense.” A commenter took me to task for that — and other things — but I’m going to stick by it. For a blogger, both of these pieces would be forgiveable; for a guy whose bio says he is the editor-in-chief of the PCMag Network and has 20 years of journalism experience, it’s pretty sad. Who said bloggers were the only ones to deliberately stir up controversy just to get readers?