Former TechCrunch Writer Spills the Truth about TechCrunch
medacity.com
medacity.com
> TechCrunch has never ever once had editorial independence. What Arrington means by independence is he calls the shots. That’s not real independence.
If that's true, TechCrunch basically has zero journalistic integrity and is a puppet rag. Can anyone credible substantiate or dispute this?
In my opinion yes. Mashable's audience includes geeks and entrepreneurs but they're branching out to entertainment, music and the internet in general. Meaning much of their audience today are more interested in Lady Gaga than Facebook's valuation, bad analogy as most are these days.
TechCrunch readers are mostly employees of tech companies, startup founders, VC's and any job within this industry. Meaning if you get TechCrunch'd people expect more opportunities to come from the post (also the knock on effect) than just traffic. It really depends what your startup does too. Part of it is your name will be known to all of these influencers. Both of these are vanity uses, really.
TechCrunch will bring you valuable, influential traffic (should do, at least). Mashable will bring you more traffic. If you need early adopters, maybe getting TechCrunch'd is useful but if you need to target a wider mainstream audience then it's probably good to get posted on Mashable.
Saying that TechCrunch is no longer relavant is incorrect but in the end, press is far less important than building a product that users will love.
Former technology editor and reporter for the New York Times, left a couple of years ago to join AOL's seed.com (so he's already in-house) - in general, an old-school newspaper guy who's absolutely committed to high ethical standards. I could not say enough nice things about him. Hell, I might actually read TechCrunch again.
I think it's important to know why/how he left if we want to make sure the whole article isn't biased.
As I recall he left under favorable terms but the relationship between him and Arrington quickly degraded (You can read Gawker's skewed to the negative account of things here: http://gawker.com/5019358/%7CcommentLink%7C)
The irony is Duncan Riley and Marshall Kirkpatrick remain the best proof that the TechCrunch authors and Arrington could move on to a new site and probably do quite well.
The irony
Since leaving TC he's started and sold one business (Inquisitor) and started another (Medacity), and also gone through a lot of personal stuff (which he's been open about on his blog, but I won't bother repeating). So I suspect leaving TC was about focusing on business opportunities and personal life much closer to home, rather than a fall out with Arrington or other causes for bias.
Thinking about Arrington reminds me of the story arc on House where the cop goes hard after him for illegal narcotics. At one point he shows up with a warrant at House's residence and finds bags full of Vicodin. He tells House something along the lines of, "Egotistical people think they're smarter than everyone else. I've already seen you willing to skirt the rules. It's reasonable to conclude you skirt other rules too, like writing your own prescriptions."
Given the public, documented things we know about TC and Arrington, it would beggar belief that he did not use his power to trade favors and influence.
Look at his subtle shot at Mashable recently:
http://parislemon.com/post/9951081147/hope-everyone-enjoys-t...
Translation: Arrington is out, this is what you can all expect to enjoy now! (not translated: Siegler crying into his iPad plushie.)
Bottomline: TechCrunch was many, many times better when Arrington was callign all the shots. It was apparent. The posts were better. The companies he was writing about were more interesting.
In the past few years, that quality went downt he drain almost in parallel to him writing less. Mike's own posts became a small fraction of TC.
There was little evidence of Mike in the TechCrunch of the past few years.
I'm sure we'll be better off without gossip on Arrington or techcrunch.