Hype doesn't just happen.

The trade press more often than not makes it happen, intentionally or unintentionally, for better or for worse.

OK, almost always for worse, according to some users, public relations professionals and former trade press editors whose punditry still appears in the publications they used to run.

It's worth keeping in mind that these are folks who actually like the trade press. Nevertheless, they have no trouble ticking off a litany of trade press sins they believe add big-time oomph to the Cycle of Hype:

• Reporters spend too much time talking to product managers, marketers, industry analysts and each other . . . and not enough time talking to the people who know the most about what works and what is hype: actual users.

• Expansive coverage responsibilities can make a reporter a jack of all technologies, master of none and ripe for manipulation by savvy vendors.

• Inexperienced reporters do not probe deep enough into the party line of vendors, in part because they haven't learned basic journalistic techniques. "You can be nonexpert in something, but know to ask the right questions," says Bill Laberis, a former editor in chief of Computerworld who now runs a consulting company.

• Ultra-competitive publications chase each other's stories, creating a whirlwind of coverage around fledgling industry trends - push products, for example - that might otherwise die from user indifference.

• Supervising editors, who too often remain camped out in their offices, are ripe targets for vendors and publicists who visit to pitch their wares. Customers who might contradict that hype do not have public relations people opening doors for them, so editors must make the extra effort to go find them.

Whether good, bad or indifferent, trade press coverage does matter a lot, however, at least in terms of determining winners and losers among competing products.

"The trade press is singularly the most powerful tool the vendors have for reaching a very broad audience," says Sheryl Schultz, president of SRS Associates in Natick, Mass.

There are certain realities to publishing that vendors can exploit to bolster their efforts. Even reporters for the weekly publications don't really enjoy the luxury of a weekly deadline - they must produce some material almost every day because publishers don't wait until the end of the week to ship all their pages to their printer. With a premium on getting material quickly, they must rely to some extent on public relations agencies, which are hired by vendors, not users.

But according to Schultz, the trade press should rely more on the assessments of IT professionals who are actually deploying the products. This means "closing the circle" by getting back to those vendors who were so anxious to talk when they made their splashy product announcements six months before:

"You said you were going to ship this product, you said it was going to do this, you had betas who said this was a good thing, can we talk to them again? Can we talk to people who are using it in production environments?"

If the answer is no, Schultz says, all you've got is hype. And even when canvassing users, the press often fails to ask the right questions.

"Network computers are an excellent example of the press going hog-stompin' wild over a stupid concept," Laberis says. "It was easy to go out and talk to users and say, 'Hey, if this thing existed, would you use it?' Of course, they are all going to say yes. But that was the wrong question to be asking.

"The question should have been: Are you willing to abandon the 30,000 PCs that you have, even if this technology were available? Every one of them would have said, 'Of course not.' "

Even worse, some vendors will brazenly use the trade press to do their product development for them, says David Strom, a former trade press editor.

"They'll say we have this new widget coming out with these seven features," Strom says. "The trade press writes about two of them and they get slammed or the phone starts ringing off the hook." The feedback is then translated into product changes.

One IT manager who keeps close tabs on the trades says he knows the difference between news and nonsense. "The hype of a new product coming out that's going to leapfrog Lotus Notes or whatever really doesn't give me a lot of value because it's just hype at that point," says Phil Easter, technology strategist at Greyhound Lines in Dallas.

But some amount of spin and hype is "accepted by readers," Easter says. And he believes his own IT experience allows him to differentiate between critical reporting and hype. "Sometimes when I read an article, I'll think 'Man, those guys really got one pulled over on them,' " he says.

Despite all of the harsh criticism, some causes of hype are beyond the control of even the diligent trade journalist, at least according to Strom.

"This industry is so complicated, and there are so many different facets to how products get used, unless you are really using the technology yourself and understand the context, you're going to get snookered one way or the other," he says. "It's happened to me, too, and I try to pride myself on the fact that I know what I'm doing, but you can't know everything."

And, in the final analysis, the trade publications serve an important role for IT buyers.

"If I didn't have them I would definitely be at a disadvantage because I wouldn't be able to make strategic moves as quickly," says Greyhound's Easter. "In a nutshell: You guys are all right."

Thanks, Phil, we needed that.

- By Paul McNamara