Eyes on the Future: Writing About Health Tech – Alfred Poor

Paid by the Word: Conversations with Writers and Editors

Alfred Poor, PhD, is the founding Editor of Health Tech Insider, a website and weekly email newsletter that provides curated news and original analysis about mobile and wearable technology for health and medical applications. Alfred is known internationally as a speaker, writer, and analyst.
Armed with a biology degree from Harvard, he’s spent the past 30 years reporting on a wide range of technology topics. For more than two decades, he wrote extensively for PC Magazine and other major computing titles. Alfred is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, and he continues to be fascinated by shiny, sparkly things that can make a difference for the better in people’s lives.

In our conversation, we talked about his role as a health tech futurist. We also spoke about the evolution of tech journalism and we talked about what happens to society at large when you stop paying writers to create in-depth carefully reported articles. I began by asking him how the shift to online publishing changed the economics of storytelling ...