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Cleaning the Eazel


By J.D. Hildebrand
July 1, 2001 — 
What journalists do, I have come to understand-even journalists who occupy tenuous bottom-rung positions on fortnightly industry trade publications like the one you hold (that is to say, even such wretches as yours truly)-is simply this: They turn facts into stories.

The world is full of facts. Events happen. Speeches are made, products launched, elections held, automobiles crashed, stock prices revised, hemline lengths altered, baseball games won and lost. Facts are omnipresent. Facts are cheap. I suppose before there were journalists, people just wandered about in the world, observed events and took them for the news. It must have been a difficult life in the days before there were reporters to tell people which facts merited attention and what to think about them.

Journalists do not merely convey facts to readers, but select for conveyance certain facts. And they structure those facts into tales that make it clear what the facts mean and why they are important. Facts by themselves mean little or nothing. It is within the context of a story-a narrative-that facts become significant, relevant and memorable.

Sometimes the facts are incidental. It is often the case that a journalist-not yours truly, of course, but a scribbler of the lower orders-mentally composes a rantlet or minor observation that would be just the thing to fit the day's quota of verbiage. And yet... in the news business, one cannot simply offer observations and opinions. Especially when one is employed as a mere reporter or columnist, and not as an editor with ex officio access to the opinion pages. One must find an excuse: a current event that illustrates a trend or highlights a problem.

Such an event is known in the trade as a news "hook" or "peg." The idea is that the event is a little bit of news upon which the reporter can hang the story.

For example, a Microsoft announcement regarding planned language extensions for Visual C++ could serve as the news peg for a "thought piece" (that is, a navel-gazing essay containing little more than the author's opinion) about language standardization. The announcement that a certain trade show has been canceled might serve as the news hook for a trend story about the conference industry's vulnerability to competition from online information sources.

You see how easy it is?

Journalists tend always to have opinion pieces at the ready. So we spend much of our time sitting around waiting for events that can serve as news hooks and relieve us of responsibility for a day of serious reportage.

That, I surmise, is what happened a few weeks ago when Eazel pulled the plug.

You remember Eazel. It's the company-famously including Macintosh design-team veterans among its founders-that developed the Nautilus file manager and user interface for Linux.

Nautilus is an open-source project intended to make Linux a stronger competitor to Windows on the desktop. When Eazel failed, journalists quickly recognized that they had an opportunity to trot out their essays questioning the viability of desktop Linux. The pundits waxed unanimously pessimistic about Linux's chances of displacing Windows on corporate desktops. It would be easy to conclude, based upon the articles, that Eazel was all that stood between Microsoft's Windows team and world domination.

As convenient as Eazel's demise was as a news hook, however, the event does little or nothing to shed light on Linux's future. The hook turns out to be insufficiently strong to support the story.

Eazel closed up shop because it failed to find a business model that would support its continued development of an open-source product it was bound to give away. The death of the company does not mean the death of the product. Because Nautilus is an open-source project, it continues to enjoy sustained development and safe deployment. That's one of the benefits of open-source software-technology's fate is not bound up with the success or failure of a single company or individual.

Nor does Eazel's death serve as a sufficient news peg for the other story making the rounds, the one calling into question the viability of open-source software now that the high-tech world's former stock-option giddiness has hardened into cold reality. OK, Eazel didn't make it. But most of the companies building, deploying and relying on open-source software aren't in the software business. Their bottom lines don't have anything to do with free software-to them, software is about making business processes more efficient and enabling staff members to work smarter. Open-source software still works great at that, whether or not Eazel can pay the rent on its office space.

The end of Eazel is a real event and may be bona fide news. But it turns out to be an insufficiently strong hook to support the stories so many reporters have attempted to hang on it.


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