Microsoft Watch Jounalist Sells Credibility on EBay!!!

Okay, so not really.  I just thought I'd give the Microsoft Watch policy of sensational headlines followed by a story to the contrary a shot.  It seems to work for them after all.  Just a couple of days ago they published a news item with a headline of "Ouch! .NET Framework 2.0 Breaks Apps" with a short story claiming that Microsoft has "run into a brick wall in terms of getting applications written to the .NET Framework 1.1 to work with .NET Framework 2.0".  Then when you click the link to read more about the story, you go to an E-Week.com article about Microsoft recruiting developers to test their applications for compatability.

This story is just that, a story.  Stephen King could have written it and it probably would have been more interesting (to say nothing of selling millions of copies and movie rights).  Sensational headlines should be sensational for a reason.  You want to grab the reader's attention and say "Hey, Look at This!!!"  And so the user clicks and... NOTHING!  No sensational story about the .NET Framework causing applications to break.  No millions of dollars lost to reworking applications.  Not one word in the story cited a single example.  You the reader have been "bait-and-switched" and that is an express ticket to losing all credibility.  I'm sure it helped their page views and ad sales though.

Then today, they publish an news item with the title of ".NET Developers: 'What, Me Worry'?" with a subtitle of "Developers are taking in stride Microsoft's disclosure that it is encountering compatability problems with its next-gen .NET Framework".  This article, unlike the other goes into several examples of talking with developers who are not in the least worried about the breaking changes.  And why are they not worried?  Because they know what the changes are!  They're documented in detail.  Microsoft didn't "encounter" the breaking changes, they CREATED them and they knew when they made the change that it was a breaking change.  Every developer interviewed for the article considers the breaking changes "minor tweaks".  Finding no real drama or element of controversy, the journalist does what all good journalists do, they ask an analyst.  Ugh! 

There are a lot of great parts about working for TheServerSide.NET and bringing .NET related news items to our readers.  But for all the good things, my worst fear is that I will somehow get lumped in with "journalists" like this.