

Four Lessons from Y Combinator's Fresh Approach to Innovation  - theorique
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/harvardbusiness?sid=H27f14ae170742d090e815c741d0e1cbb
An article on harvardbusiness.org via Bloomberg News describing YC's innovative approach to venture funding.
======
bfioca
Journalism still baffles me. It seems all too regular that important details
are carelessly reported incorrectly.

"then house those startups for a short period of time." This is commonly
misreported and so easily gotten right since everyone at YC points out this is
not true.

"strategic input from the Y Combinator team (Graham and his wife)" Overlooking
Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris is understandable I suppose since they're
not always around as much as pg and Jessica but, really? They left out 2 of
the 4 people heading YC? They couldn't just, you know, look at the "people"
page on ycombinator.com?

~~~
mixmax
Almost all journalism is this bad.The only reason you happened to notice it
here is that it's a subject you know and care about. The pieces on Obama's
strategy towards Iran aren't any better - you just don't notice it because it
doesn't stand out to you. .

~~~
ljlolel
Agreed. Anybody who has ever been interviewed for an article understands how
painfully one can be misinterpreted and marginalized.

~~~
tokenadult
I've been interviewed for various articles, and I agree that the published
article never looks like a verbatim representation of what I remember saying
in the interview. On the other hand, I've also been a journalist (not for any
prestigious publication), and I've been amazed at how much is said in
journalist interviews that is not the least bit verifiable or sensitive to
context. So journalists usually do have to adapt what their sources say as
they write up articles.

A really good book about the journalist process, sort of a "secret weapon" for
sources, is Media Smart by Dennis Stauffer, a journalist whose work I used to
see on local TV.

[http://www.amazon.com/Media-Smart-How-Handle-
Reporter/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Media-Smart-How-Handle-
Reporter/dp/B001CQC9OQ/)

Stauffer provides a lot of advice about how to get your story told your way if
you deal with the press, to the greatest extent possible, and explains what
extent of getting your way is possible.

P.S. I've also had occasion to read many court trial transcripts over the
years, and no two witnesses to the same event ever describe it the same way,
even when purporting to quote the exact words of somone else. It generally
takes multiple sources to arrive at some reasonable approximation of the
truth.

