

TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide - look_lookatme
http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/techcrunch-journalists-or-startup-shills-you-decide

======
austenallred
I just realized I haven't been to TechCrunch in months. It's rapidly become
more of a press release distribution platform than a "journalistic
institution."

And how much _interested_ traffic is it really driving? Look at the number of
comments: 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0. It used to be full of (albeit low-quality)
comments. I don't think that can be blamed on the commenting platform.

As I prepare to launch a startup and close up funding I've made contact with
some TC writers, but I don't see a TC writeup as integral to the launch
process as it used to be. I don't know if there's anything that would fill
that gap -- Show HN, maybe? PandoDaily, kind of? Talk to startups that have
been featured there, and they'll be shocked at how little traffic and interest
it drove - one app had a full writeup about them and they saw a bump of a
couple hundred downloads.

TC is as much of an ego-rub for the founders as it is anything else at this
point.

~~~
minimaxir
TechCrunch lost comments not because of traffic, but because they switched to
the barely-functional LiveFyre commenting system. (yeah, correlation !=
causation, but the drop happened immediately after.) The previous Facebook
Comments system had limited functionality, but it atleast _worked_.

I've written articles on it [1]. Yes, I have no life.

Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch.

[1] [http://www.quora.com/Max-Woolf-2/What-does-Max-Woolf-
think-a...](http://www.quora.com/Max-Woolf-2/What-does-Max-Woolf-think-about-
TechCrunchs-decision-to-stop-using-Facebook-comments)

~~~
conductr
[1] That's the oddest Quora entry I've seen. Did you ask yourself a question
so you could elaborately answer it?

~~~
minimaxir
No, someone else asked the question. (on Quora, you can tell who asked the
question by seeing who is the first follower.)

Case in point: [http://www.quora.com/Online-Commenting/Whats-the-deal-
with-M...](http://www.quora.com/Online-Commenting/Whats-the-deal-with-Max-
Woolf-on-TechCrunch-AOL-comments)

------
minimaxir
TechCrunch head editor Alexia Tsotsis published a succinct response here:
[https://medium.com/p/dbe10eb0874b](https://medium.com/p/dbe10eb0874b)

Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch.

~~~
freshhawk
Impressively honest at least.

Calling it "inside baseball" is definitely sour grapes though.

The whole post seems to say that rewriting a press release and then doing a
crappy job of trying to "dig deeper" is a small thing rather than a complete
inability to do what you promise to do by calling people "reporters".

------
benologist
TechCrunch are nothings now. This year every major story has gone through
AllThingsD and other sources, with TechCrunch rushing to post a rewrite.

All they have left is soft-serve YC press releases, major startups posting
minor updates, and generic shit like the rest of AOL's content farm churns
out.

I won't be at all surprised when next year they announce TechCrunch is re-
launching as a category on Engadget who are actively pursuing startups and are
much better at spewing out rewordings and zero-impact articles.

------
achompas
Love this because, if nothing else, The Awl's writers can...write...circles
around the TC crew.

~~~
pbreit
I had trouble reading The Awl's piece. Seemed verbose and off-point.

~~~
eropple
Verbosity is not a net negative except to robots. The Awl hires writers who
can _write_ with the kind of style that aficionados of well-turned prose can
appreciate.

------
eitally
Startup shills. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't perform _any_
journalism, or that they don't aspire to be journalists, but the news they've
chosen to coverage depends highly on their sources choosing them as the
primary outlet for news. That used to make sense, but not anymore, and
especially not since 1) Big Media have taken tech coverage seriously, 2) FAR
superior sites like Ars & The Verge provide much better general technical
cover for the same or similar things, and 3) there are a plethora of niche
blogs/sites that delve deeper still into the minutiae of nearly anything you
could imagine (consider android police, androinica, phandroid, android guys,
android atlas, andcentral, ...). Imho, TC isn't the only one suffering --
Mashable, Pandodaily, etc aren't exactly getting the new hotness first,
either.

------
ryguytilidie
Last two companies I worked with, the ceo was close with a TC writer and would
basically just forward them press releases to put up. They are absolutely
shills, but we have to ask if journalists are any different outside of tech.

------
rhokstar
I boycotted TechCrunch since the quality of their journalism has dropped
(circa 2010). Then Arrington leaves and now its an empty shell.

------
mathattack
Can they be both Journalists and Startup shills? Very interesting play by play
on the fight over there!

~~~
protomyth
Well, when they write "Like all start-ups Elite Daily is a mix of hustle,
fibbing (or outright lying), and mismanagement. We’ve seen each of the best
startups exhibit these traits." they are being a very poor shill and some
might question the journalism given that belief.

------
jerrya
Why is Disqus a thriving though flawed comment platform and Livefyre a
seemingly dead and flawed comment platform?

I don't bother commenting on sites with Livefyre as do most people, it seems.

~~~
bentlegen
How's it flawed? (Disclosure: I work for Disqus and I'm genuinely curious.)

~~~
jerrya
It seems to scale well and it provides a world wide commenting service -- in
that sense it's an enormous success.

But from site to site the UI changes, even within a site. Wired often has
articles where the various disqus links back to the article is broken.

You seem to want to be a social player with follow, etc., but I've only every
seen one person with a follower.

I will get notifications of a response, but no response can be found, the link
to the response goes nowhere (or the browser "cannot" find it to position
itself properly.)

The load times are becoming terrible and noticeably slow down page load as I
watch the disqus icon spin around.

You in some sense violated privacy when you without telling people started
enumerating was upvoting.

Often on Chrome, however you inject comments is such that the Chrome find
command, c-F, cannot find the comments.

It's hands down one of the better commenting systems out there, but in many
ways it's flawed -- that's okay, gives you room to improve.

What I find interesting is that Livefyre seems in some sense to be a clone but
whatever choices they made make it seem like commenting is a waste of time.

HTH!

------
ChuckMcM
Every now and then I like to be reminded why I put Middle School out of my
mind.

~~~
mbesto
You can always remind yourself by going here:
[http://valleywag.gawker.com/](http://valleywag.gawker.com/)

------
VladRussian2
from my understanding, western school of journalism is about providing both
sides' opinions (like public's on molesting priests and the priests' on
themselves), while i don't remember a techcrunch article simultaneously doing
both - promoting a startup as well as providing an opposite opinion.

The original posts at "theawl" \- i wasn't able to read it beyond the first
couple of paragraphs, as it is sounds like an incomprehensible blabber to me,
something along the lines of an anxious teenager describing his word argument
with another teenager.

------
Miyamoto
TC harbors some of the dumbest commentators, and many of them post on their
real Facebook account. It's like they don't know how to Internet.

------
boha
False dichotomy.

------
sscalia
In my experience...

They absolutely, positively will not cover you unless you've raised money.

Even if you have stats that blow competitors out of the water - crickets.

It's been demonstrated more than once that their traffic isn't useful to the
vast majority of startups (doubly so for B2B companies).

It's a nice thing to have coverage from them. But in no way needed for a
successful launch of a company.

~~~
randall
I agree it's totally unnecessary for your company, but we haven't raised money
and we're a Utah-based b2b company and they've covered us twice.

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/vidpresso-wants-to-help-
tv-...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/vidpresso-wants-to-help-tv-stations-
put-your-tweets-and-facebook-comments-on-air/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/vidpresso-adds-photo-
touchs...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/vidpresso-adds-photo-touchscreen-
support-to-help-bring-twitter-to-tv/)

~~~
sscalia
Just curious - do you have a dedicated PR person? Contacts? Blind reach-out?
AirPR?

