Arrington's Back
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Good he's back, I think the quality of TC dropped there...
TechCrunch - it's like choosing to read adverts.
Is your caring about TechCrunch more about the y-Combinator startups it plugs, the general state of news-blogging or interest in the content?
But the reason I said that I cared is that I worry about Michael personally. The new kind of journalism people like him and Om Malik have been evolving is very stressful. They end up being constantly plugged in. It's alarming to watch
There are some things that I'll be a little bit patient about. Cooking my hamburger? You know what, take your time, make sure it's cooked thoroughly. Putting down a concrete foundation for me? By all means, let it cure and set so I don't have to put up with cracks in a few years.
I don't have time to be plugged in 24/7 to hear about the latest startups. But I do enjoy reading about them. So, I'd personally rather read about a story once, and have the information be accurate and thorough rather than be the first to hear about a story but be misinformed.
As I approach my thirties, I remember a funny story an older guy shared with me when I was in my early twenties. There's an old bull and a younger bull walking up a hill. When they get to the top, they look down and see a whole field of female cattle. The younger bull, excited, turns to the older bull and says "I'm going to run down there and have my way with one of them!". The older bull chuckles dismissively and replies, "Okay, well I'm going to walk down there and have my way with all of them!"
Do things correctly. I'm of the opinion -- I fully understand it is simply an opinion -- that the way TC does things is incorrect. I wish they would adopt a style of investigative journalism that held to the profession's ideals a bit more. In fact, I wish more of the mainstream media would do the same these days.
A fine, ringing denunciation. But let's consider performance. Do you learn more about startups from TechCrunch or the New York Times? I learn much more from TechCrunch. By the time the NYT gets around to writing about a startup, the news is usually pretty old. And they often get the story wrong, despite their supposedly greater professionalism, because they don't understand the domain as well as TC's writers do.
If you think there's a better source of information about startups than TechCrunch, what is it?
Both readwriteweb and gigaom have better articles. The only arguable thing TC has going for it is that they're usually the first with the "news", which is only the result of Arrington's refusal to cover startups if they don't go to him first.
I've attempted not to visited TechCrunch since the the spring of 2007. The times I have were unintentional visits because I had followed a hyperlink without looking at the target site's domain in the status bar. This happens a few times a month at most. So I think it would be better to answer your question in the context of back when I was a reader of TechCrunch. Did I learn more about startups from TechCrunch than the NYT? Absolutely, I did learn quite a bit. However, I spent an obscene amount of time processing all the information that was coming through looking for stuff that was actually worth investigating.
This work is a worthy trade-off for you. The name of your game is identifying and quantifying value, preferably before anyone else even is aware of the opportunity's existence. A mining company needs to invest great resources in processing dull, repetitive, low signal-to-noise-ratio geological information in order to find gold. Well, reading TC is the equivalent task for VCs.
One has to question why the rest of us, hackers mostly, care about this "geological information". We hackers are essentially just miners. Some of us are better than others at extracting the gold from the mine we work in. The few of us that work in our own startups might want to be aware of competing neighbouring mines, having opened up our own, surely.
But otherwise, what necessitates the speculative, dramatic sort of reporting that TC has popularized? Having grown up in the 1990s, I remember a time when common people -- my teachers, friends' parents, etc. -- listened for any hint of geological information coming from a mining company called Bre-X. I distinctly remember exciting, daily reporting on the subject from all the mainstream papers and television networks (the web was a toddler back then). Bre-X had apparently found a huge gold deposit. Soon, regular people were experts at interpreting geological reports, and the media was feeding this frenzy by reporting any piece of speculation they could, as fast as they could.
I'm sure there are a few Canadians around here that can chime in on just what happened to Bre-X. The Wikipedia article does not even come close to explaining how much a part of popular culture it was for a good year or two. But essentially, the speculation fed itself and the scene became more about the speculative information than the gold that was supposed to be back at the mine; gold that ultimately was not there.
I fear that TC is caught up in this same game. Take away the speculation and there's little gold. You could kill the news.ycombinator.com and paulgraham.com websites tomorrow and people could say "Well, they had a good run. They helped spawn Reddit, Justin.TV, Dropbox, Scribd, etc." I could be wrong -- my ignorance due to avoiding TC the past couple of years may be apparent here -- but what are the startups that people will associate with TC having popularized? I can't think of a single one. But not even having read TC the past couple of years, I know a few myths that they have helped to popularize and dramas that they created.
So is there a better source of information about startups? I'd argue that what TC does well is let us know about the existence of a startup. There, it really is the best source of information. But once that startup is on your radar, going straight to the startups themselves is a pretty good source of information. Most are run in a fairly open manner, with the founders offering candid looks into their operations if you're kind enough to ask and seem genuinely interested. A lot have blogs where they answer your questions before you need to ask. Plus, people seem to enjoy connecting with other like-minded individuals and sharing their growing pains, proud achievements, and listening to advice (and taking it with a grain of salt of course!).
I suppose if everybody adopts this strategy, it would fail as it simply does not scale. So I take back what I said. Everybody else, ahem, get all your information from TC ;)
Michael isn't just any old tech journalist (although that would be fine). He's a startup founder. Tech Crunch covered startups when it wasn't popular and showed founders around the world that we weren't operating in a vacuum (all before he knew if there would ever be any money in it). The fact is he has worked his ass off writing about our industry and advocating on behalf of startups the past few years.
He's not just writing about us. He's one of us. Michael doesn't just deserve our respect, he deserves our gratitude.
Thanks Michael and welcome back!
he wasn't trying to start a flame war. he simply let his readers know what he had done during his hiatus.
and yes this is noteworthy for the startup community. when the largest start-up related blogger (like it or not) comes back after being a month out of the game (7 months in newspaper years), it's kinda a big deal.
how is a "who the hell cares?!" comment worthy of 65 upvotes? it doesn't even pass the first 2 words in the comment guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It's an interesting data point about what a minefield it is to be a public figure though. People get offended by the stuff you write, so you go off and stop writing for a month, and then they're offended that you were able to go on vacation for so long.
Being several (quite a lot of) orders of magnitude less influential than TC (and you), I try hard not to deal with it. I will invariably offend a more or less constant portion of my readership every article I write. I try to be as fair and as truthful as I can and, if that offends, say, 10% of my readers, so be it. There is nothing more I could do without compromising my own integrity.
And that is far more important than how many people I may offend.
Then again, you could be just grumpy.
I take "schedules were juggled" to indicate that other patrons were bumped, which would make MA a world-class shithead.
The visitor that got bumped probably got a discount if he comes back in a week or two, or something.
My observation is that many hotels aren't so kind about this sort of thing. I was once on the receiving end (sort of) of a similar situation, in Juneau, AK. It's a small city with a short tourism window, so it tends to be packed in the summer. Some rich piece of shit called up one of the major hotels and asked for half of it so he could throw a party. Patrons were booted, regardless of reservations. I wasn't in that hotel, so I wasn't directly booted, but it affected the entire city, because it was impossible to get a hotel due to all the displaced people. My girlfriend and I ended up staying in a "historic" ex-brothel hotel in a room right over a nightclub.