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Comment by nopal | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like someone at Fortune trying to do something industrious and then getting smacked by the higher-ups.

I wonder how many good ideas are quashed simply because of policy.

Yeah, I agree, they're trying to jerk Arrington around here.

Now fortune may have not had rights to let Arrington post it, but that's their issue most likely, as they misrepresented it, not Arrington

The first emails from them clearly are talking about excerpts in their entirety.

Hard to say...they wrote to "post on excerpts", but not "post excerpts". But obviously, what would Mike gain by only posting excerpt of the excerpt? Anyone can do that without asking permission from Fortune, it's just normal blogging practice.

Now when I think about it, Fortune looks even more ridiculous in my eyes. They basically asked TC to blog about their promotional article for free. ;-)

I agree; to me, the email says that the post would be about the excerpts, and the excerpts themselves were provided simply because they weren't live on the Fortune site yet. The email quotes in the post do NOT say he is going to post the excerpts. In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch.

He simply misread the emails. With the benefit of hindsight, he should see that they don't confirm his side of the story, which makes the blog post seem... weird. (Usually when you read just one guy's side of an issue, you don't come out of it thinking he's probably wrong.) At best, they're ambiguous. I think the natural reading favors Fortune, and I would say that if they're the best evidence he has, and he posted the excerpts based on these emails, then he's clearly wrong. But maybe he was misled by other communication.

Well, except the part where they email him saying, thank you great post.

And six minutes later, after they actually read the post, they had a substantive response. It's the classic email pattern of respond, then read, then really respond, aka, "I just noticed your email is full of words and decided to take a closer look." Except here the initial email was actually a blog post.

"In fact, referring to Fortune's "exclusive excerpts" clearly implies that they'll only be available on Fortune's site, i.e., not on Techcrunch."

The actual email says that he is offering TC the rights to use the exclusive material:

"I’d love to chat with you about FORTUNE’s exclusive excerpt of David Kirkpatrick’s book on Facebook, which I’d love to offer for tomorrow."

The advantage Michael got was that he got early access to the excerpts, so he could write about them and link to fortune, before anyone else. This is the standard way things work.

But I love Michaels repsonse, good on him. Unless they explicitly say, DO NOT USE THE ENTIRE EXCERPT, go for it. I mean, fortune and the author sent thank you emails just after they were posted, either they did not read it properly, or they were not clear themselves on the licensing situation.

It looks to me like the contact at fortune made the mistake, didn't check properly, and is trying to lay the blame on techcrunch. This is also, the standard way things work.

a better technique would probably have been to apologize to techcrunch for telling them the wrong thing, and then asking to take it down. as opposed to telling arrington that he misunderstood.

I've met so many of these management types who come in during the middle of a crisis and just demand things be fixed. Those are the worst, and one of my coworkers termed it "pigeon management" - they fly in, shit all over the place, and then fly away. Roth sounds like he pigeon managed the situation (from this one-sided account).

I laughed pretty hard when I read the definition you gave for 'pigeon management'. That's one of those phrases that perfectly sums up what can otherwise be difficult to explain..

...also known in some circles as "seagull management."

we always called it seagull management too. Especially when the manager makes an appearance, eats all the "snacks" around the office and then shits all over everything before taking off.

That would be admitting you are wrong. You can never admit you are wrong, it makes you look weak. If you look weak, you will not get anywhere.

This is really how some people think.

In the testosterone-crazed and liability-ridden culture of corporate America, this viewpoint is consistent with the rest of the universe.

If you admit you are wrong in paper/email, isn't it entirely possible that you can then be quoted on it later in an accusation of negligence?

In this specific instance for example, wouldn't admitting you are wrong in an email to Arrington immediately give him a solid case to defend himself with in the event he chose not to take it down?

Quite possibly… but which course of action is the most likely to succeed in getting the post quietly pulled?

"Hey Michael, sorry about this, but some wires got crossed on our end. My bad. Apparently…"

"Hey Michael, you screwed up. You better pull that post or else."

He used the word "miscommunication" not "misunderstood." To me, miscommunication leaves open the possibility that they told him the wrong thing, but did not mean to do so. All in all, I found the emails fairly polite (though somewhat panicky).

Isn't this also the guy who involved in a huge "miscommunication" over the Crunch Pad? It's suspicious that Arrington is repeatedly on the receiving end of miscommunications, no?

That's the first thing I thought. An intern or junior PR person taking initiative and then getting slammed by their boss. Now they (junior PR) have to backpedal to avoid getting shit from their old-school boss and, as a result, all of Fortune look like idiots.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him, therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

All regression also depends on the unreasonable man.

Touche.

Entropy wins all by itself.

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