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Comment by melvinram | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to MA & crew if it's true. Regardless of whether people care for his style of writing or what TechCrunch has become (I don't mind most of it), it warms me up to see people who bust their asses get rewarded handsomely (assuming the payoff will be good.)

I just hope AOL won't kill it by injecting content from random Seed.com writers, similar to the way Demand Media turned eHow and LiveStrong into content beds. Sure the quality of TC isn't as great as it was in it's early days but it could a whole lot worse.

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Just an observation: Techcrunch for page rank with high-end electronics reviews bolted on would give your neighborhood SEO enough money to buy his soul back, twice. Try convincing an external MBA that that is off the table.

IMO, the quality of MG Siegler's writing is barely a step up from content farms.

Aaron --

MG is one of the few TC writers who editorializes pretty liberally in his posts. I appreciate that as it makes it more interesting and it doesn't bother me as I happen to agree with most of what he says. To editorialize successfully requires you to have a strong grasp of the industry, the market forces and what direction it's moving in -- all of which I think he does quite well, along the likes of MA or Om Malik.

You may not like his writing but it's a far cry from a content farm. He's a writer. He's paid to write. That's what he does.

I have no idea why you have so many upvotes, and I guess I'm really surprised so many people agree with you.

David - I feel he has a weak grasp on many fundamentals of modern technology[1]. His grammar and spelling are the subject of widespread mockery[2].

I must respectfully disagree with your conclusion that he has a strong grasp of the industry, market forces, or direction. I have a good deal of respect for both Arrington and Malik, and I cannot say I have one iota of the same for Siegler.

He is a writer, and he is paid to write. But the same can be said for the people producing articles for Demand Media. MG's prolific rate of content production doesn't inform its level of quality.

[1] A trivial example is this article: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/twitter-just-ui-puked-on-my... where MG fails to differentiate between Twitter's CSS files failing to load and new features. I could find more if you'd like, but this is one of the more egregious from recent memory.

[2] http://plankhead.com/blog/1146/mg-siegler-destroys-the-engli...

In regards to the poor grammar -- I've no doubt they prioritize posting speed in exchange for a more liberal writing style policy.

In regards to his grasp of tech -- I see nothing offensive about your example. He says it's probably a bug, and it was. I think his ability to grasp the implications of tech is pretty solid.

Apparently we disagree, and perhaps I even hold the contrarian viewpoint in this community. At least you can cite your criticisms which is more than I expected. :-)

His ability to grasp tech is missing the instinct that sees those numbers (re: the Twitter UI "bug") and immediately thinks "Oh, duh, ordered-list tag is showing numbers when it shouldn't be. CSS file error. Happens a lot when I use Facebook and static files don't get loaded properly. Not worth writing about."

Not saying that means he shouldn't write, but as a webdev it's easy to see what's wrong with that article.

Why are you surprised so many people agrees with him? Do you think it might be possible that MG's writing is really bad and a lot of people sees it but you don't?

I'm assuming you mean, is it possible he's right?

Of course it's possible. The surprising number of votes would seem to indicate people agree with him. I don't know how many down-votes he's had though.

You are being too kind.

Yeah, it's amazing that anyone pays attention to TechCrunch :|

MG is one of the very few tech writers with both intellect, style, and sass, and it's this type of writing that differentiates TC from some tech-content-wasteland. He has a voice and a following, though maybe that following doesn't reside here on HN.

Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from Cops.

David Simon's work has won Edgars, Peabodys, and more, and has been nominated for Emmys, WGAs and many other awards I'm not able to look up right now. Has MG even won a Webby? I'd love to see MG produce better content. I read TC just like everyone else, and having less but better content would be a huge step forward to my mind.

Edit: a journo friend of mine happened to mention to me that Simon is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, fwiw.

Also, a better comparison than COPS might be CSI.

'Saying that MG's writing is barely a step-up from content farms is like saying The Wire is barely a step-up from CSI.'

COPS, at least, is real. Well, sort of.

(I would hope that) AOL should know enough to identify what makes something like TechCrunch successful. If they start filling it with shammy writing and mediocre content, it will lose its audience and die.

[edit- grammar]

And possibly create a great opportunity for someone new to emerge and fill that vacant space left by the 'old' TechCrunch?

They did okay with engadget and the rest of Weblogs, Inc.

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