The Tech Press: Screw Them All

Let’s start out by pointing out the worst part of this: the disclosure issue trickles down into TC's journalists. A FB comment on this article, as written by Alexia Tsotsis: "'It's frustrating to read comments day in and day out about how people think TechCrunch should be, or what it's supposed to say. Arrington's response: It'll say whatever the fuck we want it to, because we're people and we find some stories interesting. That's news.'

Accurate."

This type of stuff makes me want to stop reading TC. Today. Unfortunately, I still think they’re the best at what they do (mostly due to quantity of relevant coverage).

But, to get stuck there would be to ignore the elephant in the room: Arrington. So, to refresh: the original problem wasn't just that Arrington wasn't disclosing, but that he was not running stories and possibly skewing coverage because of it.

So, what does Arrington have to say to defend himself? "But the really important thing to remember, as a reader, is that there is no objectivity in journalism. The guys that say they’re objective are just pretending."

Oooh, that's a top-notch defense. By placing the blame on everybody else, he's hoping that we'll talk about everybody else -- and then ignore him, as if he's the hero by pointing out that other people are conflicted. And, let's be fair here -- he's trying like hell to shut up anyone who criticizes him now or in the future by embarrassing them, and their colleagues, as hard as he can right in the article.

But wait, let's refocus on that last sentence -- and their colleagues. Arrington touches on Kara Swisher, and then after mentioning that she disclosed fully (which she did on the original article; see: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110428/godspeed-on-that-investi... ) he then attacked her colleague who has no relevance at all to this. To quote Arrington: "One of her writers, Liz Gannes, is married to a Facebook consultant. She covers the company and its competitors regularly. She discloses it as well, but it isn’t clear whether or not her husband has stock in Facebook. That’s something as a reader I’d like to know."

Arrington’s game here is pure deflection with an end-goal of humiliating critics as hard as he can. It’s hard to not feel sorta disgusted here.

And to those of you who say he’s trying to get fired by AOL? I think he is, too. The reason that Arrington stated that he was willing to be bought out by AOL was: "I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software."

But that's hard to believe. CrunchBase isn’t bringing in any revenue (Creative Commons Attribution License) and I doubt it can be monetized. It brings little value for anyone who isn’t interested in angel-seed startup investing.

So, let’s look at Gawker’s analysis of the TechCrunch/AOL deal:

"Although the details of AOL's purchase agreement with TechCrunch have not been released, the consensus is that AOL used a three-year earnout designed to give Arrington and other TechCrunchers an incentive to stick around and do a great job. Based on various reports, we estimate that this earnout could likely amount to $10-$15 million above the original purchase price. $10-$15 million is a significant amount of money, even to Mike Arrington. We suspect, therefore, that even if Arrington gets bored or loathes working for AOL, he won't just quit because that would mean walking away from this cash.

If AOL management gets tired of Arrington's behavior, meanwhile, they presumably can't just fire him, because this would likely trigger a full payment of the earnout. To can Arrington and avoid paying the earnout, AOL would likely have to fire him 'for cause' And given that this behavior is par for Arrington's course, it would be hard to argue that it constituted 'cause'."

So, yes, even though Arrington wrote in 2009 that "one change I’m going to make at TechCrunch is to get rid of all of our investment conflicts. I’ve long been an angel investor and have continued to make a very few investments even after starting TechCrunch. These investments are always disclosed and in my opinion we do more than enough to maintain transparency there. But it’s also a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility. So over the next few months I’m going to divest myself of all of those investments in an orderly fashion, and I’ll update readers on the progress. I’ll also discontinue making any further investments," when you fast forward to 2011, his statement is an implicit admission that he's trying to undermine TechCrunch's credibility:

"I have also become a limited partner in two venture funds, Benchmark Capital and SoftTech VC. I am considering investments in a few other venture funds and a couple of startups as well, but have nothing further to announce yet.... When these investments are complete, in a few months, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be a direct or indirect investor in a lot of the new startups in Silicon Valley, and that will mean that there will be financial conflicts of interests in a lot of my stories. Either because I write about those companies, or write about a competitor, or don’t write about a competitor."

If Arrington's trying to poison the site, and I think he is, I'm going to try to find another news site. It's only going to go downhill from here... with a lot of bluster and paranoia from Arrington against all threats, real or perceived.

TL;DR - "Tu quoque."

Additionally, when I read Kara Swisher's article in AllThingsSD, the next thing I read was her own disclosure (http://allthingsd.com/about/kara-swisher/). It left me with the impression that she takes journalistic integrity very, very seriously (maybe even too seriously, honestly). Arrington's self-righteous, dismissive diatribe here leaves me with exactly the opposite impression about him.

I'm gonna go ahead and agree with the the title and use it as my justification for not reading the post.

A long time ago (about a few months after the acquisition of techcrunch by AOL) i came to the conclusion that arrington is trying to get himself fired by AOL.

I happen to show some techcrunch articles to a psychologist friend of mine because she was doing some research on the tech industry and she casually mentions that all the articles by "this arrington dude" sounds like a man who is trying to get himself fired. Note this is coming from a person who is reading techcrunch for the first time and does not follow the tech industry at all.

After her comment, i did a filter on all arrington's articles and i understood what she was saying right away. All you need to do is just look at the general tone of his articles after he moves to Seattle.

So the question is why. Is he trying to end his vesting period early and get a big payout? Or is he genuinely sick and tired of the press industry?

What about the many Joe average readers that criticized the situation? Should we assume Mr. Arrington thinks they should get fucked too?

Most of this comes down to the fact that there are good, established reasons why it's a bad idea to have journalists covering industry buying and selling positions in those companies based in large part on abuses that have happened.

Puffing out your chest and screaming about your competition doesn't actually change anything about the fundamentals of the issue.

The right play for Arrington here: admitting he straddles a unique spot in the tech coverage universe and pledging that he will do his best to keep things straight-up. He deserves some criticism. But that said, one of the reasons he continually serves up good scoops is because he wears more than just a journalist's hat. He could have pointed that out. Instead, he let petulance leak into what could have been a thoughtful post, turning it into a rant.

"I have little hope for this industry until the last of the old guard have finally been put down."

I don't really think the "new guard" is any better - pretending a sentence at the top of some handful of articles is transparency while scores of startups send emails to a gaping black hole from which few will be saved.

They're not going to start telling people they're not getting a writeup because MA invested in a competitor, or worse suppress the news of your awesome new feature/traction and pass it on to the agile little team he's betting on (prob reaching too far on that one, not that we'll ever know though).

That is the transparency that matters, not that some fluff piece amongst the sea of fluff pieces they churn out had a more visible bias than the rest.

I'm conflicted.

On one hand, I agree with his rant on other tech journalists / editors, but on the other hand, what he's essentially saying is, bias on his part is okay, or even expected, if the company he's writing about is one that he's investing in?

Given how influential techcrunch is, are you supposed to cross check all the companies in his portfolio, figure out if the company you're reading about is a competitor and then adjust for bias as you read? Isn't there a huge difference between being loosely linked to Google / FB and investing in a company?

My dear journalists, this meta-journalism is boring to those who aren't in your profession. Your vanity is troubling.

The best part of that was the headline "the tech press:" Doesn't arrington realize that he is as much a part of "the tech press" as any of them?

This seems to be a bit too close to Arrington being shocked, shocked that gambling is going on in his establishment to be taken at face value.

I am strongly on Mike's side on this one, because I have seen too many back deals in Silicon Valley. There is conflict everywhere and being married to a Google VP while covering the company is worse than having 1000 shares in a bunch of startups.

The truth is that everyone here wants to do the right thing and believes they are ethical enough to set aside any conflicts that may arise. I like to think that I would do that as well. In reality, it doesn't quite always work.

This is a non issue, everybody knows media is biased because it is made up of human beings and human beings are biased. Save the drama, consumers should always balance a story with one from another publication. It's kind of like if you see something on the fair and balanced fox news you just gotta balance it out by watching the coverage of the same event on cnn or msnbc. People who choose to be informed objectively do that anyway.

When thinking of Arrington, I am reminded of the story about the Native American and the snake. (Guy finds and injured snake, once it is healthy it bites the guy and as he is dying he asks the snake wy he bit him after all he did for he snake. The snake says you knew I was a snake when you took me in.)

Slightly off-topic:

Sometimes I think TechCrunch and Michael Arrington could be a little more cordial.

On the other hand, I respect it, and him, for being open and straight forward about things.

Arrington might be a bit whiny here but he brings up a good point: why is it not considered required disclosure to not only state your own conflicts of interests but also those of your spouse? The government considers your incomes to be the same household so why not the institution of journalism? Couldn't I just do all of my investing under my wife's name and then say I'm not conflicted?

This is why I don't subscribe to TC rss feed. I only read (some of the) TC articles which make it to the HN front page. This is exactly the kind of things what HN is for.