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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)
@ashley.rolfmore.com

This is... pretty much how consumer journos work. They'll cover a job or story in an area, get rehired freelance, and eventually its their thing. Industry reporting is different to consumer reporting - you expect them to know more from industry they're reporting on, as their audience knows more.

Mic Wright@brokenbottleboy.bsky.social

I saw a screenshot of this and had to go and check if it was real. How can you be the BBC’s cyber correspondent and not have heard of PHP before yesterday? *And* now be talking confidently about it on the news. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ck...

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Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)
@ashley.rolfmore.com

I expect someone writing for the Society pages of the Guardian to know what a social care Direct Payment is. I expect someone writing for Lex to know what quantitative easing is. They're not the same as a consumer facing journo, who are for the general public and not industry specific professionals.

Mic Wright
@brokenbottleboy.bsky.social

I’ve been a journalist for 21 years. Knowing what PHP is in that beat is really not something deeply obscure. But the really silly thing here was casually saying he didn’t know what it was until yesterday.

Ashley Rolfmore (she/her)
@ashley.rolfmore.com

Fair. But I do prefer this to the old style of pretending you always knew? And it's a common explaining technique these days to follow "I didn't know about it either, did some work and got some experts to check, here's it distilled for you in an digest-able format".

Mic Wright
@brokenbottleboy.bsky.social

No, I absolutely don’t like people pretending to be all knowing. But it’s a spectrum. And that is a basic thing to not know on that beat. It matters because there’s your audience *and* the sources etc you have to interact with.