Page 42 - Cyber Warnings

While these large national newspapers and news magazines perform well, perhaps the more
interesting story comes in the form of the other sorts of news outlets that have been thriving
alongside these well-known outlets.

Smaller regional newspapers have been providing excellent coverage of cybersecurity issues;
this despite the fact that these are the papers that are supposed to be experiencing the worst of
the cutbacks.

The San Diego Union Tribune, based in a city with important technology industries, been
reporting extensively and effectively on cybersecurity issues at a level that is disproportionate to
their size.

While many smaller papers may have decreased their state capital coverage or become more
reliant on wire services, these papers show that institutional focus on an issue like cybersecurity
can translate into important news coverage.

There is increasingly an ecosystem of often mutually reinforcing new voices and institutions that
are making the coverage of cybersecurity issues ever more exciting, too. Nonprofit journalism
organizations – such as ProPublica, whose Julia Angwin has been doing excellent work on
surveillance – have come to play an important role.

New media organizations such as Vice, through its Motherboard digital news portal, and Ars
Technica have become go-to sources for news from the digital battlefield.

Even traditional magazines that don’t focus on national news, but on more narrow topics, have
thrived on this issue. For example, Consumer Reports has produced impressive work on how
individuals can improve their privacy from tracking by governments and corporations alike.

Finally, even lone journalists – the archetype of whom in the cyber world is Brian Krebs – have
leveraged the web as a forum from which to continue conducting investigative journalism on
cybersecurity topics.
Krebs, operating on his own, often is the first to report major breaches, and he frequently ends
up alone facing threats from hackers upset by his reporting.

Despite all of these advances, reporters face the challenge of trying to keep up with a rapidly
changing field as technology grows and criminals exploit new ways of stealing information,
secrets and money.

Too often, reporters show little understanding for the depths of the secret internet or the
intricacies of how hacking works.

These are complicated issues even for the experts. Behind closed doors at government
agencies, at major corporations and at a growing number of cyber-safety-focused nonprofits,
executives and leaders struggle to understand the evolving scope of threats.

42 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2017 Edition
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