David Pogue's secret weapon: Patience

Paul Boutin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:25:20 -0400

New York Times gadget guy David Pogue, a former Broadway orchestra conductor and MacWorld back-page columnist, is probably the world's most widely read and watched tech product reviewer. As a fellow contributor to the Times, I can confirm that anything Pogue writes pulls down several times as many page views as my most popular work. How does he do it?

Careful reading of Pogue's columns this year has taught me a surprising lesson: Most technology writers jump the gun on hot products or categories. They're too eager to prove their on-top-of-it-ness in the tech world.

Pogue, by contrast, exercises nearly superhuman patience. He waits. Sometimes he gets an advance briefing, such as his exclusive hands-on hour with the iPhone in January 2007. Much of the time, though, Pogue hangs back until a point at which any other gadget reviewer would be embarassed to write about, say, the Flip camera (March 20, 2008) or Twitter (February 11, 2009.)

This week, David Pogue finally writes about netbooks, a topic the Standard has been pummeling for months. Pogue's shtick is clever: He plays the role of the buffoon who has belatedly wandered into the action long after he should have, much like P.J. O'Rourke covering the Middle East for Rolling Stone in the 1980s. Like O'Rourke, Pogue serves as a proxy for his reader: Not an insider, but an outsider with questions that would make insiders roll their eyes in contempt.

Pogue takes the hit for his readers. They're not the early adopters on Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption curve. They're the pragmatists and conservatives. The mass market. The horde of buyers who actually make gadget manufacturers rich. Pogue lets them feel normal which, statistically, they are. He answers the questions they've only now come around to asking out loud.

"Well, this is a little embarrassing," he wrote about the Flip. "One of the most significant electronics products of the year slipped into the market, became a mega-hit, changed its industry -- and I haven't reviewed it yet." Cute, but the truth is he waited until its significance was undeniable before saying so. He's not interested in predicting the future of the camera market. He wants to tell readers about the hottest camera on the market right now.

Unlike Wall Street Journal gadgetmeister Walt Mossberg, Pogue doesn't position himself as a kingpin of the industry whose products he covers. Nope, he waits until a million late-adopting New York Times readers have demonstrated widespread interest in, say, netbooks. Only then does he pretend to stumble in to observe that "the popularity of netbooks ... is real."

What he's really doing is echoing the thoughts of his huge, non-tech-industry audience. Trust me, your parents are nodding right along with David Pogue.

Pogue on Twitter a few weeks ago:

For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?

By now, anyone who's not already on (or already off) Twitter is wondering exactly that: Why do I need to bother with it? Just in time, along comes the New York Times' State of the Art columnist with the story.

Based on the unsolicited Pogue-bashing I get via email, on AIM, and at the nerdy social events I attend, David Pogue must have the thickest skin on the planet. He's willing to let A-list bloggers look down their noses at his late-to-the-game reviews. He's willing to let Unix sysadmins buttonhole me at parties to tell me what an idiot David Pogue is. Um, yeah -- now how about we hit him up on Twitter and compare his traffic stats to yours?