>2. They're reporters... if they don't know what's going on in their own backyard, there's a serious issue.
The point is that it's not really their back yard. It's a different office on a different floor, possibly even a different subcontracted company than where the journalists are working. They don't have any more scope to be aware of the ad tech than they do understanding how a CDN works.
By analogy, this is kind of like expecting a journalists in the old days to be especially aware of conditions in paper mills because their papers are printed on paper.
I don't see how the "location" matters. I'm arguing that it's a similar subject. If you're investigating advertising practices, I'd hope that you know quite a lot about that subject in general, which includes how it's done at other companies.
How can you talk extensively about the way Facebook does advertising without knowing how its done everywhere else? Doesn't that make you a bad journalist?
By analogy, it'd be like if someone was reporting on how a burger at McDonalds tastes, without having eaten a burger anywhere else.
> The point is that it's not really their back yard.
If you're going to research a topic and some of that research turns up as "Lots of websites run these ad networks" it is a necessary step to ask "do we do that too?".
So there's two options here:
1) The reporter knew the parent company does this.
2) The reporter doesn't know.
In case 1, they either don't talk about it because they are blocked or they don't think it is necessary (which I'd argue is at best misleading and at worst malicious). For case 2, well that just doesn't seem like good reporting.
So I think your analogy doesn't work. It isn't because "people don't know tech" but rather "are journalists asking the right questions and doing good research." If the latter is poor because "they don't know tech" then we have a major problem and as the tech class we need to call them out on it (create a feedback loop to solve the problem).
The point is that it's not really their back yard. It's a different office on a different floor, possibly even a different subcontracted company than where the journalists are working. They don't have any more scope to be aware of the ad tech than they do understanding how a CDN works.
By analogy, this is kind of like expecting a journalists in the old days to be especially aware of conditions in paper mills because their papers are printed on paper.