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Comment by Kylekramer | Hacker News Reader

It is quite the jump from “This is the path we’re headed down – a single unified, ‘beautiful’ product across everything. If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" to "Agree with SPYW or GTFO". One is an admirable goal for a whale of a company and the other is a stubborn denial of contrary opinions. I thought Pando Daily was suppose to be a "different" tech news site.

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I don't think Sarah Lacy is capable of producing a "different" tech news site, really. The article read like a tabloid.

what qualifies as a "different" tech news site?

Something like Ars Technica, which is way meatier than the hyperbole and cheerleading that the PandoLemonCrunch school of venture journalism is capable of.

Tech news does tend to head towards this kind of article. I think they will have some in depth long form pieces mixed in with the standard stuff. I think the problem is that to really drive page views you need a lot of this stuff, many posts a day. Going in depth will earn you some different readers at the cost of some others and people won't revisit nearly as often.

Agreed. A lot of her stories look like ad placements for the companies she's covering too.

Yeah, I'm not really impressed by a journalist who calls Zynga a "hot new company to work for".

Yeah, the quote seems pretty clearly to be in reference to Google Plus in general and the universal toolbar and redesigns they've been rolling out, not the social search results specifically. Pretty misleading article.

When the top executives at your employer are saying "If you don’t get that, then you should probably work somewhere else" it means precisely "the matter is decided, agree, go along quietly, or GTFO".

Given the context, it's not much of a jump. Both the fact that this was said at an event after the "Search Plus Your World Launch" and also the strong emotion implied by "you should probably work somewhere else" indicate that this was mostly about their shift into social.

My guess is the event had nothing to do with the launch, it seems more likely to be the weekly TGIF meeting (http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/culture.html). I don't really see much strong emotion. It is a CEO saying this is the direction we are taking, so if you don't like it then you are going to continue to not like it.

Of course, Lacy's take is the direction = SPYW as it was launched (as it is the news of the moment), which I more charitably interpret his words as direction = unification of Google products.

I would argue that journalists shouldn't be making "jumps" at all. Report and critique the facts not what you think they may imply.

I disagree. I can get the "facts" from Twitter or Reddit or HN. What's missing from those streams, however, is a well thought out intellectual discussion about the facts and what they mean from different points of view.

The OP is a bit light on discussion, however that doesn't mean they should do no discussion whatsoever.

Did this really warrant downvotes? It's a perfectly reasonable point of view, calmly stated.

That depends totally on the context (what question was that an answer to, how much ranting had there been on other internal fora before that, what was the tone of the answer, etc).

Which the author totally ignores.

That's because eyeballs are what matter, not accuracy or responsible journalism.

TV journalism's decline in America took decades before we got to the current trash; the exact same process happened to journalist blogs over a couple years in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Oh, really? The title says "Agree or GTFO" on your screen? Odd, it doesn't look like that at all on mine.

Ever heard of a little thing called hypocrisy? Just curious.

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