Tech journalist Beth Pariseau gives us a peek at what she’s seeing shape up for 2024, shares her experiences as woman in tech media

Q: First, tell us about you and how you became a journalist. What do you like most about your career? Least?

Beth: This all started for me when I was a sophomore in college. I'd entered college as a music major but switched to English by the second semester. I went to UMass Amherst, which has a student-run newspaper, The Daily Collegian, and that was a way to make money writing both while I was in school and, I thought, afterward. I knew I wasn't cut out to be a novelist or an academic. Eventually, I did a co-op at the Boston Globe – the first week I worked there, the paper ran its first spotlight story about abuse within the Catholic Church. I got to hobnob with some greats and it opened some doors for me, but a couple of years after college, I realized it was unlikely I'd get a full time staff reporter job at a newspaper given what was happening to the print news industry. I entered the word "writer" into Monster.com and a news writer position at an online tech media company called TechTarget popped up. That's how I got into tech. 

What I like the most about my career is that it uses my skills. I graduated with a BA in English and it says "writer" on my business card. I never want to take that for granted. And as a journalist, I get to write what I believe to be the truth, not what someone pays me to say. I also like that I ended up in tech because there isn't the ambulance-chasing you can get into in general assignment reporting. I'm interested in tech, but I don't have strong opinions, which makes me well suited to cover it (unlike, say, politics or sports). Sometimes I wish I wrote things my mother could read, though!

Beth Pariseau

Q: We know you enjoyed our Chasing Grace Project docuseries about women in tech. What has your experience been like being a woman in the tech media space? 

Beth: Things have gotten better, at least from my perspective. 'Booth babes' were still a thing when I started in tech. Now there are actual lines for the ladies' room at many tech conferences (and sometimes no ladies' and gents' at all!). It took until about 2018, but that year a conference finally passed my personal Bechdel test: two women / femmes who were regular attendees – not speakers, not token 'rock stars' – talking to each other in the hallway about what they were working on. 

I also want to note that I have a somewhat limited view of this issue. It's been relatively common for women to be in PR and media during my time in the industry, and I've never experienced having to be someone's boss at a product company. I'm sure I can't even imagine what that must've been like 20-plus years ago, but the docuseries filled in some of those details. Also, I write about enterprise tech, which is self-limiting as far as the breadth of its audience, so I haven't had to deal with some of the ugliness women in consumer tech journalism have faced in recent years (knock wood!). And I'm saying all this from the perspective of quite a bit of privilege as a white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied woman.

Q: You’ve been a journalist for many years, having launched a number of media properties and won awards for your writing. How do you see tech media evolving today? How have things changed? What’s the good, bad and ugly?

Beth: The good has been that moving online from print freed up opportunities for me that I wouldn't otherwise have. In the print world, there were limited column inches to compete for on the printed page, and those inches went to senior reporters and editors first, so it was really hard for a younger person to break in. Moving to online media was how I gained experience working a beat, developing sources and longer-term trend stories because there wasn't any limit to the number of words that could be published in a given day. Being a tech journalist has been good, too, as digital transformation, especially post-pandemic, has put tech much more in the mainstream of people's daily lives. 

Unfortunately, beyond very high-profile household name publications, much of journalism now faces some serious challenges, including online. I have friends who have written for mainstream pubs and they've had a really tough path of trying to survive as humans while working as writers – especially as other types of media gain favor and generative AI approaches being able to churn out basic stories. It's not as bad in tech as, say, local newspapers, but tech has felt those effects.

Q: As you might know, it’s Storytelling Week. When working in tech media where product features are often the lead, how do you use storytelling techniques to create a deeper narrative in your reporting?

Beth: "Speeds and feeds" of products are fine, but ultimately readers can get those things from vendor marketing materials. My job isn't to present my readers with product information, but to give them a place to see how their peers are solving similar problems and where experts see the industry headed, as well as how a particular product or technology fits into a wider context. I try to stay focused on that human aspect of things, thinking of what will provide value for a reader in doing their job day-to-day. That usually involves a narrative, whether it's a case study about one company or a trends story about multiple companies. In the end, I'm trying to connect people and ideas together, like any storyteller.

“My job isn’t to present my readers with product information, but to give them a place to see how their peers are solving similar problems and where experts see the industry headed, as well as how a particular product or technology fits into a wider context.”

Q: You cover a lot of enterprise software and infrastructure. How is the massive AI story trend impacting your reporting? How do you view it? What’s your perspective on this?

Beth: AI absolutely 'ate the world' last year. There was no aspect of tech or IT that it didn't touch -- vendors are building gen AI into products from business productivity to cloud infrastructure, from consumers to back-end engineers and from the C-suite to entry-level employees. We have a reporter for our data management sites who is keeping tabs on the firehose of news about generative AI itself, so I get to focus on how it's affecting my audience of enterprise DevSecOps professionals and software developers. I try to view it through the lens of that group, which helped make the overall flood of information a bit easier to wrap my brain around – and I hope that it helped my audience, too. As with every world-altering technical breakthrough, there has been a ton of hype and speculation about its long-term implications, but most enterprises haven't yet deployed it in production. This year, my sources tell me we'll get into more real-world usage of the tech, and, I think, start to understand its capabilities and limitations more realistically. There might be that 'trough of disillusionment,' to use Gartner's term, and there are plenty of potential risks that might cause some early growing pains. But there might also be uses for generative AI or problems it can solve that nobody's realized yet. 

Q: We’ve been reading your Twitter and LinkedIn posts on predictions for 2024. Do you have one you’d like to share with us? If so, please dish. 

Beth: Aside from the generative AI juggernaut continuing, my reporting has been focused lately on broader issues for enterprise IT like open source sustainability and licensing, which will continue to be a hot topic for discussion this year in the wake of HashiCorp's move to a business source license. Cybersecurity is an ever-present issue, and software supply chain security will likely see more real-world implementations this year as technical tools mature and organizations figure out how they want to use them. Another big trend I've followed since my early days as a data storage reporter is the explosion of data and data gravity, an issue that still hasn't totally been reined in, especially with digital transformation leading to more applications spinning up and AI taking in and pumping out huge volumes of data. IT pros are rethinking some of their approaches to observability and hybrid cloud, among other things, to accommodate data management and its costs. 

Q: We host a popular Book Club for women in tech and media. What are you reading right now?

Beth: I just finished reading The January 6th Report – it was a challenge, but it's a primary source of information about contemporary history and I felt like it was important to read it. I also just finished a wonderful novel by David Mitchell (author of Cloud Atlas, one of my all-time favorites) called Ghostwritten. Now I'm reading a graphic novel published in 2001, Box Office Poison, that a friend lent me years ago. It's set in 1994, and it's weird to look back on 90s angst from a 2020s perspective. I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going at a time, so I'm starting a book called War Without End about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.