It wasn’t too long ago that people would proudly say they worked in Cleantech. Now Cleantech is a dirty word associated with failure.
60 minutes had a piece on Cleantech which focused on the failure part. I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me about the 60 minutes video.
Then GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher wrote her analysis of what 60 minutes got right and wrong in their story.
What 60 Minutes got right and wrong in its story on the “cleantech crash”
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JAN. 5, 2014 - 6:50 PM PST22 Comments
SUMMARY:60 Minutes just aired one of the more mainstream looks yet at the Silicon Valley cleantech rise and fall. While they got some things right they also got some wrong. My take here.
Katie had the benefit of months of knowing the 60 minutes broadcast was coming out.
Full disclosure, I spoke with the producers of the 60 Minutes piece on background a few times over the past few months as they were putting it together, just to try to help them go in the right direction.
Katie presents her view of what 60 minutes got right and wrong.
Contrary to the reaction of many of my Twitter friends, I think 60 Minutes got some key things right in the story, but they also got a couple of things wrong in there, too — most importantly they’re overlapping the Valley story with the government funding story. Here’s my take on their piece, which — to their credit — is one of the more comprehensive mainstream media looks at what was the VC cleantech phenomenon: