

Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories? - noss
http://www.kullin.net/2009/08/can-you-trust-techcrunch-enough-to.html

======
chipmunkninja
I've increasingly been viewing TechCrunch as the Bill O'Reilly show of the
startup scene. The noise-to-signal ratio and tabloidesque sensationalism is
too painful for my own personal tastes.

However, I know lots of people who find it most useful, but I avoid it like
the plague.

~~~
seldo
I have been experimentally attempting to avoid reading TechCrunch over the
last week and discovered I don't miss it.

Anything important they cover is covered in more detail elsewhere (usually
they're just re-reporting something from the WSJ/NYTimes) and surfaced for me
either by Techmeme or Hacker News. All of TechCrunch's original reporting is
dross, and often inaccurate.

There seems to be this consensus in the tech community that TechCrunch is an
industry-shaping dealmaker, but that reputation seems mostly to be coming from
TechCrunch itself.

~~~
jkincaid
I know it's popular to bash TC on here, and I've long since accepted that it
comes with the territory, but this is a pretty ridiculous comment. We
frequently break news before the WSJ and NYT.

Case in point: the Google Voice/Apple/AT&T fiasco. We broke the news that
Google had submitted their application six weeks ago and subsequently had it
rejected. Until then, everyone was under the impression that Google was still
"working on it".

~~~
nir
"We frequently break news before the WSJ and NYT"

That's not so hard when you don't observe the same standards for verifying a
story. The impression is that TC simply publishes early and often -
statistically, some of it turns out true.

~~~
CamperBob
Indeed, the time-honored _Drudge Report_ methodology.

------
kyro
What really gets me are Schonfeld's replies to those trying to provide
additional information with respects to the accuracy of the article. To tell
someone to go petition the UN, etc, is really damn ridiculous. It's childish,
lazy, and cheap. Sometimes I find TC authors' comments and replies to 'trolls'
to be just as trollish.

I'm not a TC bandwaggoner. In fact, I quite like them, and have found the
quality of their posts to have increased recently, but little things like this
shouldn't happen. Putting in that extra 0.5% of effort to act cordial and
double check facts will go a long way.

------
mbenjaminsmith
I just had the pleasure of reading another 'oh my gawd, PR people are so
stupid' story over at TC. For me that's the journalistic equivalent of
Nietzsche's music of decline.

That latest Twitter fiasco shows what they're all about. I love that
publishing virtually meaningless private data (which was stolen) was somehow
an expression of their journalistic integrity. Because we needed to know that
Twitter plans on being the pulse of the planet? Come on.

They're the tech news equivalent of Cops.

------
Dauntless
I can't believe everyone on TechCrunch can't see the difference between
"highest percentage increase in green house gases" and "worst greenhouse gas
emitters"... are they that foolish...

Of course countries that emitted few greenhouse gases have a higher percentage
increase because any slight variation is a big one, while USA who is a mammoth
when it comes to greenhouse will logically have small percentage changes
because it's already huge (similar with GDP changes, 1% of GDP increase in USA
is equivalent with 380% of GDP in Sweden for example and so on... btw, bogus
numbers just to exemplify).

~~~
CamperBob
I was pretty unimpressed when they published stolen Twitter documents after
publicly pretending to agonize over the decision. A professional journalist
wouldn't have done either of those things.

~~~
jacquesm
second that. Techcrunch has been in my zonefile since then pointing to
127.0.0.1 to avoid the temptation.

------
fredBuddemeyer
watch for their journalism to turn a brighter shade of yellow now that the
crunchpad is competing with the companies they cover. arrington just wrote a
vilifying little piece about getting rid of his iPhone in order to go with a
dizzying configuration of beta/vapor options from google voice. this story
seems particularly huffy and shows the need for conflict of interest
disclosure now.

------
00joe
Stopped reading them months ago, started finding the blogs that are original
sources, now I get much better news coverage.

~~~
toni
Can you please recommend some of your new findings? It's always interesting to
read alternatives to TC.

~~~
Dauntless
you can also check <http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/> I guess

------
adrianwaj
It's too mainstream for me. 3 million rss subscribers means there's a lot
stuff they won't publish because they are trying to please all those
subscribers at once, most of the time.

I also wonder about its balance: are there sites, categories and companies
that are excluded so as not to jeopardise the IN crowd?

------
iamwil
[http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/01/america-makes-
nothin.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/01/america-makes-nothin.html)

Seems like Boingboing made the same mistake of mixing up the original function
vs the first derivative.

------
alain94040
My defense of TC: in a world where everyone is too scared to voice a clear
opinion, TC will tell it to you straight.

When they see torture, they don't say "enhanced interrogation techniques"
(<http://twitter.com/dangillmor/statuses/933969163>)

So many other media outlets will not dare say anything negative about the news
they cover.

~~~
extension
They don't have the same allegiances as the mainstream media. That doesn't
mean they don't have any.

