Huh? No I didn't. The claim was never the New York Times.
The register is competitive with the times, they compete for clicks on reddit/google news and so on. I expect the quality to start out more akin to the register (or really, more akin to Wired).
I assumed that because you didn't override the parent assumption. The Register may compete with a very narrow section of the times, but I wouldn't call them competitive (and I doubt many others would either). For example, only one of those outlets regularly breaks stories that are reported on in every other outlet and only one of those outlets has our highest politicians regularly read and quote from it.
The Register is pretty good trade journalism. I doubt your average software dev would get anywhere close to that anytime quickly especially in the absence of existing source networks. Probably closer to whatever write up press releases sources there are.
I agree it's pretty good, and that the average software dev couldn't do it. However, I have seen a few of their articles in passing and haven't run into any that involved non-public sources. I just went to their website and all four of the top stories have no information that couldn't be found by googling. For 3/4 I'd seen an article closer to the original source on HN.
There's very little about trade journalism that involves true scoops.There used to be more but the economics mostly don't support a lot of trawling for unannounced information.
Context is still useful. But if you already have the context, the pub may not be that useful.
Pretty much what I wrote. Providing context, interpreting what was said, providing additional/opposing data points.
Reporting on an announcement still has value if you position it relative to other products/market even if there's no secret information. Bringing in other perspectives.
Lots of real journalism is really low quality, so this means you would have a product that is in some sense competitive.