Is good reviewing a dying art? 
Sometimes, I think it is. And I’m speaking from experience.
Back in the day, I wrote a lot of reviews — mostly about software and hardware. To write a proper review, I’d (in the words of the folks at 37 Signals ) live with what I was writing about. I prided myself on spending at least two weeks working with the program or device, putting it through its paces and trying to break it. If I had any criticism or praise, it was because I got to know the subject of my review and could write about it with some authority.
While I think that the Web is a great medium to express ideas, I’m constantly disappointed by many of the so-called reviews that I read online. Not just reviews by ordinary people, but also ones written by professional journalists. Two recent examples of this: comments at Amazon.com about the company’s new Kindle book reader, and an article about the Nokia N810 Internet tablet in the online edition of Information Week.
With the Kindle, the people who were complaining about the device (not the service to get books, which is an entirely different issue) never used it. They moaned about the price (a tad high, I admit), the form factor, the screen, and the like. But, as I said, most of them never lived with the device, or even held a Kindle in their hands.
With the article on the N810, the writer (a professional journalist) started off by saying that he’d only looked at the device for five minutes or so at a trade show. Yes, a whole five minutes. No matter how experienced you are with technology, you can’t pass judgement on something in that short a space. It takes a bit of time to get the feel for something; once you do that, you can start to form opinions. No sooner.
That said, I have seen my share of shoddy reviews in print publications, too. In the mid-1980s, a music critic for a Toronto alternative paper started a review with word to the effect: “You can tell a lot about an album by looking at its cover.” My translation: “I couldn’t be bothered listening to this album, but I have to write about it. So …”
Another example popped up in a local computer publication. It was a review — and I’m being kind — of a book titled Understanding Japanese Information Processing. The piece took up about two column inches, and was pretty much a rehash of both the back cover copy of the book, and the press release that the publisher sent out. It was obvious that the person who wrote that review didn’t read the book.
Reviewers who take shortcuts are doing their readers a disservice. It’s difficult to effectively write about something if you know next to nothing about it, or if you don’t take the time to learn its ins and outs.
A review is an opinion, but it’s an informed opinion. Unless your opinion is informed, your review is not much better than speculation, or just blatant cheerleading or bashing.
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[...] Basing a review of a work on only part of it — be it a single track off an album, one chapter of a book, or the first five minutes of a movie or TV show — is dishonest. You’re not getting a full picture of what you’re reviewing, and can’t make an educated assessment (which is different from a guess). More on my thoughts about this here. [...]
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