Coverage as a Force: What Gets Seen and What Gets Believed
Faraday's read on the trade press: coverage is not a mirror held up to a market, it is a searchlight, and the searchlight has a budget. The trades cover what they have beats for, what their audience clicks, and what vendors feed them. A technology that generates announcements gets written about. A quiet, essential, unglamorous corner of the market can be enormous and nearly invisible in print. The danger is confusing volume of coverage with size or importance of the underlying thing. Read the trades for signal about what the market is being told to care about, which is different from, and sometimes opposite to, what actually matters.
Knowledge check
Why can heavy trade-press and analyst coverage of a technology be a poor proxy for that technology's actual market size or importance?
Show the answer
Because coverage tracks newsworthiness and vendor promotion, not economic weight. Trades write about what generates announcements, what their audience clicks, and what vendors actively brief them on, so a category rich in launches and funding gets amplified while a large but quiet, mature, or unglamorous market gets little ink. Volume of coverage measures narrative energy and marketing spend, which can run ahead of, behind, or sideways to real demand, so treating column inches as a size signal confuses the searchlight for the terrain.