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Comment by MattGrommes | Hacker News Reader

I wish Gittip all the success in the world but I'm afraid this is a big barrier to getting anything written about the company, and that can only hurt. It's not only TechCrunch that's going to balk at this, I can't see any news organization wanting to get scooped by their own source. I don't think taking the other party's needs into account when running a business is necessarily bending your principles. Maybe recording the call for release after the story comes out is a way to meet in the middle.

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If reporting a 'scoop' was the only kind of valid journalism then I might agree with you, but it isn't and the fact that TC relies on that form of journalism so heavily is reflective of their shortcomings rather than issues or barriers for Gittip.

Journalism is also about providing a narrative that provides the reader deeper understanding of a topic in question. There's easily space for that kind of journalism to exist in conjunction with the raw data of individual conversations that take place to generate that narrative. In the same way that data journalism takes data available to anyone and makes it palatable I would expect the same could easily be done in this case if the journalist felt the story was engaging enough.

Nyah, I love what this guy did and how he's sticking to his principles. It's smart too: his approach itself becomes newsworthy vs. swimming with the rest of the fish.

Classy way to hande the TC reply too. It was clearly a d--k response, but he didn't even comment on it. Just put it out there (in the spirit of openness) to let others draw their own conclusions about the way TC handled it.

TechCrunch's relevance has long been on the decline anyway. Soon enough they'll be begging for stories.

I left it off the post, but my reply in email was, "Thanks! :-)"

As I understand it, part of the point of Gittip's policy of openness is that there are no scoops. Scoops occur when only one party has important information (usually that someone else would rather keep hidden), and that's not supposed to happen.

  I don't think taking the other party's needs into account when running
  a business is necessarily bending your principles.

This sentence is sufficiently vague as to be basically content-free. Of course any given action on the part of gittip isn't "necessarily" bending their principles, until it is. Here, if Techcrunch's "needs" include having a scoop, then accommodating that need would bend their principles. QED.

And hey, the whole thing got them on the front page of HN. It's not the first time. It may be working.

The thing about techcrunch's response is that the guy doesn't even try to make something work. If Ycombinator and other start ups decided to stop doing anything with techcrunch it would be over. Obviously TC has clout, but that doesn't mean they should piss in the well and ignore a great story. They should have capitalized on the fact that Chad stuck to his guns and seen if they could make it work. The could have posted the video themselves and tried to be innovative. Instead they wasted his time and treated him poorly.

Gittip is a great concept and Chad has done an amazing job building community based on the ideals of the community. He has created something that has value. I'm glad Techcrunch doesn't get to leach off his innovation and creativity.

Yeah, a limited-time embargo would seem reasonable.

I would've been happy to look harder for a compromise, but clearly he wasn't interested in wasting his time with me. And why should he? TechCrunch has no shortage of stories. Gittip is peanuts.

He could've participated in the open call just to see what it was like, and there is a story there in and of itself. If TC was interested in tech journalism, they would have agreed to it, but sadly they're interested in page views and maintaining their "too good for you" image.

Keep up your awesome work and transparency, which is incredibly important and desperately needed in transactional businesses. Transparency builds trust.

I think an embargo would be a good place to start. Suggest that the Skype session will be reported, but only published after the article goes live. In fact, TC has a whole series of videos on their blog [1], so I can't imagine this type of interview would be too out of line.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/video/

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