
Arrington's Back - bkrausz
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/02/back-i-am/
======
wheels
This already got killed once: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499909>

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axod
It'll be interesting to see if he addresses things like the last.fm story, and
how things really went without him.

Good he's back, I think the quality of TC dropped there...

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metatronscube
who the hell cares?!

~~~
pg
I do.

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jodrellblank
Why?

TechCrunch - it's like choosing to read adverts.

Is your caring about TechCrunch more about the y-Combinator startups it plugs,
the general state of news-blogging or interest in the content?

~~~
pg
Whether or not you like it, TC is the "paper of record" for startups. Most of
the new startups I hear about, I hear about there first.

But the reason I said that I cared is that I worry about Michael personally.
The new kind of journalism people like him and Om Malik have been evolving is
very stressful. They end up being constantly plugged in. It's alarming to
watch

~~~
9oliYQjP
They have "evolved" a style of "journalism" that involves blind repetition of
speculative, often unverified, information. It's like they are playing a game
of broken telephone, but with a megaphone in hand. They have to be constantly
plugged in because -- guess what -- that is the only value that they offer;
the ability to be first at all costs.

There are some things that I'll be a little bit patient about. Cooking my
hamburger? You know what, take your time, make sure it's cooked thoroughly.
Putting down a concrete foundation for me? By all means, let it cure and set
so I don't have to put up with cracks in a few years.

I don't have time to be plugged in 24/7 to hear about the latest startups. But
I do enjoy reading about them. So, I'd personally rather read about a story
once, and have the information be accurate and thorough rather than be the
first to hear about a story but be misinformed.

As I approach my thirties, I remember a funny story an older guy shared with
me when I was in my early twenties. There's an old bull and a younger bull
walking up a hill. When they get to the top, they look down and see a whole
field of female cattle. The younger bull, excited, turns to the older bull and
says "I'm going to run down there and have my way with one of them!". The
older bull chuckles dismissively and replies, "Okay, well I'm going to walk
down there and have my way with all of them!"

Do things correctly. I'm of the opinion -- I fully understand it is simply an
opinion -- that the way TC does things is incorrect. I wish they would adopt a
style of investigative journalism that held to the profession's ideals a bit
more. In fact, I wish more of the mainstream media would do the same these
days.

~~~
pg
_They have "evolved" a style of "journalism" that involves blind repetition of
speculative, often unverified, information._

A fine, ringing denunciation. But let's consider performance. Do you learn
more about startups from TechCrunch or the New York Times? I learn much more
from TechCrunch. By the time the NYT gets around to writing about a startup,
the news is usually pretty old. And they often get the story wrong, despite
their supposedly greater professionalism, because they don't understand the
domain as well as TC's writers do.

If you think there's a better source of information about startups than
TechCrunch, what is it?

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mariorz
_> If you think there's a better source of information about startups than
TechCrunch, what is it?_

Both readwriteweb and gigaom have better articles. The only arguable thing TC
has going for it is that they're usually the first with the "news", which is
only the result of Arrington's refusal to cover startups if they don't go to
him first.

~~~
wheels
I second ReadWriteWeb as well. Almost as fast, more technical, less
sensationalism. I've pretty much stopped reading TechCrunch except for the UK
section of late (and there just to keep tabs on Europe-specific stuff since I
prefer it to TheNextWeb).

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mccon104
wow i have to say i'm a little astonished at the emotional (and largely
negative) responses from people to Arrington simply announcing to his readers
that he is back.

he wasn't trying to start a flame war. he simply let his readers know what he
had done during his hiatus.

and yes this is noteworthy for the startup community. when the largest start-
up related blogger (like it or not) comes back after being a month out of the
game (7 months in newspaper years), it's kinda a big deal.

how is a "who the hell cares?!" comment worthy of 65 upvotes? it doesn't even
pass the first _2 words_ in the comment guidelines
(<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>).

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RossM
This came off to me as a boastful post, showing off that he can afford
holidays in these credit-crunchy times. Is this just me or am I being grumpy
again?

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pg
I'm sure he'd be astonished to find that anyone thought that.

It's an interesting data point about what a minefield it is to be a public
figure though. People get offended by the stuff you write, so you go off and
stop writing for a month, and then they're offended that you were able to go
on vacation for so long.

~~~
crescendo
I'm not offended by the fact that he went on a long vacation, or even that he
wrote an article about it. What bugs me is that somehow it's front-page news.
This article has zero content.

~~~
pg
The news is not the part about where he stayed; it's that he's back on the
job.

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krav
Oh goody. The web was crashing without him.

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nir
Don't worry, it's being rebooted now:
[http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/01/microsoft-rebooted-the-
web-...](http://scobleizer.com/2007/05/01/microsoft-rebooted-the-web-
yesterday/)

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gcheong
Now I know where I might want to stay if I ever go to Hawaii. Thanks for
posting this.

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time_management
_He said something about being fully booked, but I offered to pay more than
his usual rate and said I’d plug Surfboard House on TechCrunch (consider that
a disclosure). He had (and still has) no idea what TechCrunch is, but the
dollars did the trick. Schedules were juggled, I stayed._

I take "schedules were juggled" to indicate that other patrons were bumped,
which would make MA a world-class shithead.

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pclark
why? would that make him a shithead? Surely it'd make the hotel a "shithead"
or something?

The visitor that got bumped probably got a discount if he comes back in a week
or two, or something.

~~~
time_management
You make a good point, which is that there might have been a discount offered
or some other incentive, and the rescheduling might have been entirely
voluntary on the part of the patrons. I'm not going to pass final judgment,
since I clearly don't know the full story.

My observation is that many hotels aren't so kind about this sort of thing. I
was once on the receiving end (sort of) of a similar situation, in Juneau, AK.
It's a small city with a short tourism window, so it tends to be packed in the
summer. Some rich piece of shit called up one of the major hotels and asked
for half of it so he could throw a party. Patrons were booted, regardless of
reservations. I wasn't in that hotel, so I wasn't directly booted, but it
affected the entire city, because it was impossible to get a hotel due to all
the displaced people. My girlfriend and I ended up staying in a "historic" ex-
brothel hotel in a room right over a nightclub.

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mhb
Hairy?

~~~
olifante
Pain?

