(Photo: Business Insider)

Twitter attempted to have a conversation about race and the tech industry yesterday. The loudest voices?  White men on either side of the argument shouting each other down. What got obscured along the way was just how much pattern-matching plays into the lack of diversity in the tech industry and the people who cover it and how that holds all of us back.

They almost made Jamelle Bouie’s point for him.

In a feature for The Magazine, Mr. Bouie examined why the mastheads of tech blogs like The Next Web, The Verge, Engadget and Gizmodo were overwhelmingly white and male. Rather than “overt racism,” he found a prohibitive combination of dependence on unpaid internships--and the network effect of a wired boys club whose members sometimes seem to be talking solely for each other's benefit.

Technology has become just as pervasive as the Valley had always hoped, Mr. Bouie noted:

Gadgets are used by everyone. African Americans and Latinos, for example, are huge Internet users. They use Twitter and Facebook at higher rates than whites, they’re the most likely to use their cell phones for Internet usage, and the cell phones they buy are — for the most part — smartphones.

But so many of its gatekeepers are cut from the same cloth, limiting “aspects of their perspective.”

(For the purposes of his argument, Mr. Bouie focused on African-American and Latino writers: "In no way does this discount the real problems of access and representation for Asian Americans, but compared to African Americans and Latinos, they have much more representation in technology journalism." It's an important distinction. "Who Has It Worse," has to be the most divisive game ever marketed to minorities. But we all know there is a difference. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to themselves or doesn’t spend much time at tech events.)

I've never been discriminated against as a tech reporter because I’m Indian. At least I don't think I have. It's impossible to say, really, because there are a number of other factors that make me counter-to-type for a tech blogger. In addition to not being white, I’m not a dude and I didn't come from a family that had any interest in technology or media. It wasn't until I was 26 that a small J-school scholarship, student loans, and a semi-patient live-in boyfriend helped balance the cost of living in New York City with the limited income of a low-paying magazine internship.

The problem with identifying racism is that it seldom happens in isolation. Often it’s a confluence of factors that inspire people to see you as enough of an "other" to underestimate you, ignore you, deny you access, or simply not want to help.

Silicon Valley, however, does not respond well when its virtue is called into question. Unlike Wall Street, say, the tech industry cares what you think of it. It wants to be seen as a bootstrapped meritocracy--until the VC check arrives--open to all exceptional individuals and beholden to nothing but the disruptive tide of innovation ushered in by its gadgets, services and apps.

To imply otherwise is to call into question the hustle--the defensive posture of a “crush it” culture, which helps obscure both self-doubt and the fact that success can be capricious.

Mr. Bouie’s essay followed a similar line of reasoning to the one we've heard about the lack of black and Latino entrepreneurs and investors. ("I don't know a single black entrepreneur," Michael Arrington told CNN in 2011 before recanting his statement, claiming it caught him off guard.) Substitute "inability to find funding" for "unpaid internships," but the network effects and pattern-matching stays the same. Mark Zuckerberg becomes a billionaire and suddenly Ben Horowitz feels comfortable crowing that Andreessen Horowitz "likes to invest in college dropouts with insane ideas going after tiny markets with no way to monetize."

Another recent discussion, this one about sexism faced by women working in gaming, devolved into making fun of male tech writers somehow. Trust me, male tech reporters do not need any more attention. There is already an entire phalanx of marketing and PR professionals--by and large capable women--who make them feel special. That whole dance is about as gendered as a Budweiser commercial.

Still, why is there so much attention being paid to the people covering tech when the industry itself faces very real race and gender gaps? As Melissa Gira Grant recently wrote about girl geeks vs. boys kings, “the unpaid and underpaid labor of women is essential to making that machine go, to making it so irresistible.” Besides a touch of solipsism, it’s likely because the media has such entrenched discrimination problems of its own. It’s not just tech bloggers who are mostly white men. In 2006, The Observer looked at the magazine world’s vanilla ceiling. No one could believably argue that much has changed.

It’s a pity that the conversation around Mr. Bouie’s article degenerated into piling on his most easily dismissed detractor, Jason Calacanis. In the same breath that he invoked the emergence of post-race society, Mr. Calacanis assigned a percentage of Korean-ness to his daughter's face. Imagine being that child and then let's all move on.

Perhaps a better way to encourage more diversity in tech reporting is to look at why diversity is important. As Mr. Bouie noted, the homogeneity of voices has lead tech writers to sleep on Pinterest’s popularity with women and dismiss concerns about how App.net might lead to white flight because of the Twitter competitor’s $50 fee.

What’s more, the proliferation of apps, gadgets and services--coupled with the metastasization of the often complacent tech press--has amplified the noise-to-signal ratio.

A report last month claimed that of the 430,000 odd apps that will debut in the iOS App Store this year, most will go unnoticed. Gatekeepers can influence which products get attention and adoption, which in turn can affect funding.

Venture capital firms sometimes talk about pattern matching, the act of identifying traits of successful entrepreneurs and companies in order to replicate their wins. Even an industry that prides itself on innovating, it seems, actively seeks to propagate the status quo.

That might also be the reason why, when we read about how black people use Twitter, it's so rarely from their own perspective.

Thus far none of the posts related to this week’s controversy have shown up on Techmeme, so no points on the leaderboard for trying to talk about race. And the biggest beneficiary to all the ink spilled might be Marco Arment, the bomb-throwing developer behind The Magazine. Here’s hoping that changes.

The asking price is said to be between $70 and $100 million--a clear indication to Ms. Lacy (a former TechCrunch editor) that "AOL is hoping to make something off the drama of the past couple of years:

$70 million would net the struggling Internet company about $10 million profit on what AOL originally paid for both TechCrunch and Engadget’s original parent Weblogs Inc. According to one source, AOL management has been seriously considering the move since early this year. The news also sheds light on why Arianna Huffington was so relaxed about relinquishing responsibility for the division last month, according to reports."

All that said, Ms. Lacy acknowledges that her sources know of no "serious bidders" at the moment. Michael Arrington certainly isn't interested. "I don’t know anything," he told PandoDaily, "No one tells me anything. I am not in the least bit interested [in buying back TechCrunch]. I was Team Pando all the way until Sarah Lacy fired me. That does not change my position on TechCrunch."

What will happen next? Will Vox Media, owner of The Verge, pony up such a substantial sum? Has the seemingly neverending TechCrunch drama poisoned the well for potential buyers in spite of its huge name recognition? Will J.R. emerge from his coma? Why was Bobby also The Man From Atlantis?

We'll surely have these answers and more very soon. Or not.

The Verge launched yesterday in the early a.m. without a hitch: a sleek tech news site complete with longer analysis, forums, a product database and a Q&A with insanely-popular Apple blogger John Gruber to ensure a nice inaugural traffic boost.

"For me, this was an idea that was forming for a long time," said Josh Topolsky, former Engadget editor and current editor and co-founder of the new site. The editor—Jimmy Fallon's gadget consultant and electronic musician—was getting notes from co-workers as he spoke to Betabeat this morning by phone ("26, 27 editorially-focused employees? Okay, I'm being told it's 29"). 

"I wanted to build the perfect tech site that was accessible, not like a brick wall of nerdiness, with longer form features, more reviews, more editorials, get columnists and freelancers coming in to write the in-depth stuff..." he trailed off. "To me, design is super-important."

Mr. Topolsky and the former Engadget employees who followed him to the Jim Bankoff-bankrolled venture had been squirming over the lack of resources and other obstacles that come with working as a subsidiary of Aol.

Engadget bled writers and editors after the acquisition of The Huffington Post; Mr. Topolsky actually stuck it out after his colleagues including Chris Ziegler, Paul Miller and Ross Miller ditched (all three are now working at The Verge). But with The Verge, they had a blank slate. In six months, the editorial team worked with the product designers to build a site tailored to The Verge's mission: delivering breaking gadget news, hardware reviews, tech analysis and longer-form features in a beautiful format (let's not call it sexy).

But as they built the site—figuring out what they wanted a new tech site to be with a completely blank slate, what they needed built, how the workflow would go, what it really means to give a phone an 8/10 score, and so on—the editorial team found it impossible to stay out of the news cycle. "For the past few months we’ve been working on building The Verge while we were publishing news on This Is My Next," Mr. Topolsky explained, referring to the placeholder site where the future Verge team has been publishing three or four posts a day, often scooping Engadget and getting more traffic than they ever expected. TIMN now redirects to The Verge.

"That’s actually really difficult, which we kind of learned by accident. We didn’t intend to do This Is My Next. We were all publishing on our own blogs, and we're tweeting everybody else's links, and finally we said 'this is stupid, let's just write in one place.'"

As tech becomes more mainstream, Mr. Topolsky expects The Verge's audience will too, part of why the presentation was so important.

"It's not just about great content," he said. "You gotta present content to people in a way that is beautiful, not only something they like to look at but also functional. This is something that can be combative, trying to make it beautiful and useful, but we’re striving to do both. That was one of the first conversations we had [with Mr. Bankoff]. We said, 'if we’re going to do this we have to think of it from a design standpoint, not just about content.'"

Now that The Verge is live—"the sense of relief was incredible when the site went from not being there to being there," Mr. Topolsky recalled—it immediately started doing six times TIMN's traffic numbers. With some writers based in Europe, the site's been cranking out posts 24-7. The startup tech news site is scouting for talent from editorial to video production to sales. They're also looking for new space; the team is already "crammed in" a Flatiron office they picked up as a temporary home while getting off the ground.

Any closing thoughts? we asked Mr. Topolsky, who immediately gave a shoutout to the devs. "The product team is incredible," he said. "We work really closely to them. It's a huge relief to have been working on something for 6 months, and it’s finally real."

Nilay Patel, Paul Miller and Josh Topolsky.

Engadget veterans and gadget fetishists/heroes Josh Topulsky, Nilay Patel and Paul Miller started work "a few weeks ago" on a consumer tech site that will launch under the sports-centric SB Nation brand, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff tells Beet TV, and will be setting up an office in Union Square.

Already, sources are leaking information to the Engadgeters' interim project, thisismynext.com, the crew's informal gadget podcast and blog. They've also been joined by former Engadget reviews editor Joanna Stern and former Engadget writers Ross Miller, and Chris Ziegler.

The former Engadget editors cited various reasons when they left AOL, including conflict with the parent company over the infamous "AOL way" commoditization of content.

The editors are preparing content--"plans, writing all sorts of reviews and other things"--while the company works to finalize the publishing platform and the site, Mr. Bankoff said. The new site, whose name has not been announced, is scheduled to launch "the next great tech publication" in the early fall.

The next podcasters.

Former Engadget Show netcasters Joshua Topolsky, Nilay Patel and Paul Miller hit the web yesterday with This is my next Podcast, a show and blog that will serve as an outlet for their collective tech wisdoms during the between-jobs period before the launch of the much-anticipated tech site at SB Nation.

The network of sports sites seems an unlikely fit for nerd news, but Mr. Topolsky et. al. say it's a leaner, meaner, better-equipped platform for tech news than the bloated and unscrupulous company that still umbrellas Engadget.

"As you probably know, Josh, Paul and I are hard at work on a new tech site with the awesome team at SB Nation, but we wanted to keep podcasting in the meantime," Mr. Patel wrote on the blog. "So welcome to This is my next Podcast, our temporary home until the new site launches sometime in the fall."

The inaugural podcast was yesterday; the team says they'll be broadcasting on Thursdays. "Wow, This is my next Podcast is number 1 in all tech podcasts on iTunes right now! WOW. We love you, whoever you are," Mr. Topolsky tweeted. And in fact, it is.

Over the weekend Miller announced his departure by blog post, noting that, "I’d love to be able to keep doing this forever, but unfortunately Engadget is owned by AOL, and AOL has proved an unwilling partner in this site’s evolution."

With the recent acquisition of the Huffington Post, it's clear CEO Tim Armstrong is trying to sharpen the focus of AOL during its transformation to a media company. But the relentless drive towards profit doesn't sit well with editorial staffers like Miller.

"As detailed in the 'AOL Way,' and borne out in personal experience, AOL sees content as a commodity it can sell ads against. That might make good business sense (though I doubt it), but it doesn’t promote good journalism or even good entertainment, and it doesn’t allow an ambitious team like the one I know and love at Engadget to thrive," wrote Miller.

On Sunday Associate Editor Ross Miller announced his departure from Engadget as well, citing the AOL way as a catalyst. Josh Topolsky, editor-in-chief, tweeted this out in response.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

AT&T has offered free Wi-Fi in Times Square to its customers since May as part of a pilot program to test ways of shoring up its cell coverage in areas with heavy use.

The pilot was apparently successful, because AT&T has expanded the area of Wi-Fi coverage in Times Square and is adding more by Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick's Cathedral. Those hot spots for AT&T customers will be coming in the next few days, according to a press release posted by Engadget, in time for New Year's Eve.

The expanded hot spots will add data network capacity in high traffic areas. AT&T customers with qualifying data plans get unlimited access to AT&T hot spots at no additional cost.

The quality of voice calls and coverage on AT&T has vastly improved over the last year in Manhattan, as have 3G download speeds.

In January, AT&T acknowledged its Manhattan network was subpar. But now, with the help of Luke Wilson, it's back to bravado.

"AT&T today delivers the nation's fastest mobile broadband experience nationwide as well as the nation's largest Wi-Fi network, giving customers the best combination of speed and coverage," the press release says. We'll know when eight million people try to tweet on New Year's, won't we?

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries