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Really? It's my recollection that most of the communities I'm involved in applauded and relished in the shutdown of Gawker. I do believe there were some tangential worries that meandered around the forest of "freedom of speech"/"-of the press" but as the dust settled I think all parties realized those worries were, as a consensus, ill-informed.

My point is that a single publication does not an indictment of an entire field make. You can criticize TechCrunch all you want, and I'd probably agree with you; the quality has decreased significantly, and yellow presser write-thrus are very common now, and it's not even a publication I read. That's the key: it's not a publication that I read, nor that you need to read. They exist independently of the journalism profession as a whole, don't reflect on it, and can disappear without impacting the rest of the landscape. They have a very specific audience. You are not in it. Part of that audience is startup PR, who they actively court because they need the material.

With "fake news" and all that, journalism as a profession is under fire. I absolutely hate to see discussions like this that personify journalism as a boogeyman, out to exploit and "get you," based on one yellow presser that is suddenly "the problem with journalism."

Stop broadening to attack an entire field of mostly good people based on one publication and/or article you don't like. Imagine if that was tried with literally anything else: imagine if we indicted biosciences based on Theranos ("the problem with genetic testing today") or hedge funds based on Martin Shkreli ("the problem with finance today") or engineering based on Peter Madsen ("the problem with rocketry today") or computer science research based on Uber ("the problem with self-driving today"). There are bad actors in the world, but journalism seems to attract commentary like this, where a bad actor suddenly means the whole field is indictable. That makes absolutely zero sense, and the more I argue against it, the more I'm convinced it's a willful siege by people who know what they're doing.