This week Paul is crabby because of some bad PR experiences. He had an interview with one company that probably had seen “All the President’s Men” too many times and was confused about when something can go on background or off the record. Once something has been said, it is on the record.

Another all-too-common tactic is to send multiple follow up emails, “hope you had a nice weekend” (it is Tuesday, thank you very much) “and check back with you.” Really?

In the news last week was the Amazon S3 outage. Paul got several emails with offers of sources to comment on the dire state of affairs of the Internet. (Didn’t you know? Neither did we.)

To round out our sourpuss series, we have this report from the DC-based policy think tank called the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The study shows the tenor of tech reporting has become more pessimistic over the years, with a number of contributing factors such as more realistic understanding about the effects of tech, more sensationalist headlines, or just more people (including some news organizations) who want to use tech threats for their own particular purposes.