Due to low salaries and high turnover, journalism continues to face the problem of reporters seeing failed trends repeated, not spotting them, and repeating the same failed cliches of earlier years, mainly due to orgnaizational inertia.

Two examples.

First, from the Financial Times, a piece on Internet sites being bought by media companies, "falling prey" to them being the operative cliche. On the whole these are market losers cashing out. The buyers aren't getting much, and the story doesn't examine the track records of the sellers. There's a story here, but not the one written.

Second, we have the BBC with the idea that consumer demands drive tech developments. If the iPod were possible 20 years ago does anyone deny we would buy it?

It's the hard drive makers who are driving demand, not the other way around. Once Apple and TiVo showed how to sell hard drive-based devices to the masses, today's trends were easy to predict. But even before the iPod storage demands at every level were growing exponentially. And they will continue to grow, soaking up all the demand that makers can supply.

Let me repeat. These cliches are repeated because editors feel comfortable with them and because young writers don't know any better. Until the media has the wherewithal to hire more writers who've served time in the trenches, this nonsense will continue...and you'll just have to get the truth from blogs.