How not to get on covered on TechCrunch
After that, I figured 'hey! Maybe I actually have a chance with TechCrunch!'. In my mind TC covers only very high profile, tech-related startups, so at first I didn't think that they would be interested by a science news site started part-time by a PhD student in retrovirology ;) So I submitted my story via the form on their contact page. No answer for two days, so I submitted it to Mashable, which wrote a post about the site very quickly (http://mashable.com/2008/05/21/eureka-science-new/). Cool, but the traffic this link generated was much lower than I expected (< 200 views, Drupal gave me > 6000).
I then looked back at TC contact page and noticed a the 'newstip' email link at the top of the page; the contact form is much more visible, but now I can tell that the newstip email link is much more efficient; I wrote a quick mail about my site and the coverage that we got so far on Drupal and Mashable, thinking that it would help getting covered on TechCrunch.
This time they answered promptly; I was very excited! But they said that while my site was very interesting, they like to cover news first and that they were going to pass on this one since we got covered by Mashable, even if they love science.
It's very sad because Eureka Science News is the first vertical I used my intelligent news aggregator for - copyright-free press releases are readily available for most news published daily; I'm looking for VC funding to license Associated Press content to build a website covering all news categories. Getting on TC would have helped for sure!
So don't make the same mistake, submit to TechCrunch FIRST via the newstip email link, not the contact form! At worse, you'll get rejected and you can give the exclusive to someone else ;) I sure wish I did, now I won't know the kind of traffic TC can send (but I'm sure its more than the 200 hits I got from Mashable!). I even had nightmares about it last night, a thing you sure want to avoid ;)