TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide

theawl.com

93 pointslook_lookatme46 comments

I just realized I haven't been to TechCrunch in months. It's rapidly become more of a press release distribution platform than a "journalistic institution."

And how much interested traffic is it really driving? Look at the number of comments: 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0. It used to be full of (albeit low-quality) comments. I don't think that can be blamed on the commenting platform.

As I prepare to launch a startup and close up funding I've made contact with some TC writers, but I don't see a TC writeup as integral to the launch process as it used to be. I don't know if there's anything that would fill that gap -- Show HN, maybe? PandoDaily, kind of? Talk to startups that have been featured there, and they'll be shocked at how little traffic and interest it drove - one app had a full writeup about them and they saw a bump of a couple hundred downloads.

TC is as much of an ego-rub for the founders as it is anything else at this point.

TechCrunch lost comments not because of traffic, but because they switched to the barely-functional LiveFyre commenting system. (yeah, correlation != causation, but the drop happened immediately after.) The previous Facebook Comments system had limited functionality, but it atleast worked.

I've written articles on it [1]. Yes, I have no life.

Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Max-Woolf-2/What-does-Max-Woolf-think-a...

I stopped reading TechCrunch when they switched to the Facebook commenting platform and you made irrelevant comments in almost every single post. Not that I stopped reading because of you or the commenting platform, but it's the last thing I remember about TechCrunch.

Oh, hey Max. Yeah, the old systems worked better. Disqus was better, I believe, but we got into it right at the start and it kept going down at critical moments, so someone insisted (maybe erick?) that we ditch it. Bad move, I said, but nooo!

[1] That's the oddest Quora entry I've seen. Did you ask yourself a question so you could elaborately answer it?

No, someone else asked the question. (on Quora, you can tell who asked the question by seeing who is the first follower.)

Case in point: http://www.quora.com/Online-Commenting/Whats-the-deal-with-M...

Techcrunch used to be my #1 go-to tech site a few years ago. After they switched to the Facebook commenting system, I stopped caring about it, because I found I didn't want to comment anymore. Also, if anything, I think Facebook comments were ultimately worse than the ones before.

I agree they made it even worse with Livefyre but not necessarily because of the system itself, but because they're requiring "Techcrunch accounts" for it. So they've gone from bad decisions to worse, for the commenting system.

To be fair, I started commenting on TC after the switch to FB comments from Disqus, so I can't comment on the before/after.

I agree that forced registration for "TechCrunch Accounts" doesn't help at all. One of the advantages of FB Comments was zero-click registration for new users. For better or for worse.

I quit reading TechCrunch/CrunchGear after they published an article about how human rights violations in China were a good thing. I forget what their argument was. I used to check their site multiple times a day. I decided not to give them ad revenue after that.

> not to give them ad revenue after that

You can use adblock and other tools. In fact, on TC it's essential: ghostery reports 15 different classes of trackers and ads on the site

As much as I support ghostery and other non-tracking tools, I believe its a stronger position to not use a service you don't agree with rather than steal it.

I agree. I'd rather not use a service at all which I find morally objectionable, than just deny them revenue and keep using it. Adblock does kind of feel like stealing to me.

I never read any startup news or any of that nonsense, I don't read 90% of HN blogs. So pointless. If your product is good, people will tell each other, and it will spread.

These blogs are one way how people tell each other.

Thank you for sharing that with the rest of us.

I have your medal here, just waiting for an address to send it to.

TechCrunch head editor Alexia Tsotsis published a succinct response here: https://medium.com/p/dbe10eb0874b

Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch.

Impressively honest at least.

Calling it "inside baseball" is definitely sour grapes though.

The whole post seems to say that rewriting a press release and then doing a crappy job of trying to "dig deeper" is a small thing rather than a complete inability to do what you promise to do by calling people "reporters".

I respect this follow up... I think she gets it. But I feel the "rewrote press release" isn't that unusual.

Disclosure: A previous startup of mine was covered on TechCrunch. It was a rewritten press release... It felt so good.

TechCrunch are nothings now. This year every major story has gone through AllThingsD and other sources, with TechCrunch rushing to post a rewrite.

All they have left is soft-serve YC press releases, major startups posting minor updates, and generic shit like the rest of AOL's content farm churns out.

I won't be at all surprised when next year they announce TechCrunch is re-launching as a category on Engadget who are actively pursuing startups and are much better at spewing out rewordings and zero-impact articles.

Love this because, if nothing else, The Awl's writers can...write...circles around the TC crew.

I had trouble reading The Awl's piece. Seemed verbose and off-point.

Verbosity is not a net negative except to robots. The Awl hires writers who can write with the kind of style that aficionados of well-turned prose can appreciate.

The Awl is a prose-y site (for want of a better word). You either like it or you don't. I like it a lot.

Startup shills. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't perform any journalism, or that they don't aspire to be journalists, but the news they've chosen to coverage depends highly on their sources choosing them as the primary outlet for news. That used to make sense, but not anymore, and especially not since 1) Big Media have taken tech coverage seriously, 2) FAR superior sites like Ars & The Verge provide much better general technical cover for the same or similar things, and 3) there are a plethora of niche blogs/sites that delve deeper still into the minutiae of nearly anything you could imagine (consider android police, androinica, phandroid, android guys, android atlas, andcentral, ...). Imho, TC isn't the only one suffering -- Mashable, Pandodaily, etc aren't exactly getting the new hotness first, either.

Last two companies I worked with, the ceo was close with a TC writer and would basically just forward them press releases to put up. They are absolutely shills, but we have to ask if journalists are any different outside of tech.

I boycotted TechCrunch since the quality of their journalism has dropped (circa 2010). Then Arrington leaves and now its an empty shell.

Can they be both Journalists and Startup shills? Very interesting play by play on the fight over there!

Well, when they write "Like all start-ups Elite Daily is a mix of hustle, fibbing (or outright lying), and mismanagement. We’ve seen each of the best startups exhibit these traits." they are being a very poor shill and some might question the journalism given that belief.

Given the working definitions of "shill" and the cannons of "journalistic integrity" (namely objectivity) are at literal odds... I would say no; you cannot be both.

Why is Disqus a thriving though flawed comment platform and Livefyre a seemingly dead and flawed comment platform?

I don't bother commenting on sites with Livefyre as do most people, it seems.

It should be noted that LiveFyre has a "SocialSync" feature which syndicates comments from the owner's Facebook page, which may inflate the comment count.

It is a terrible feature.

How's it flawed? (Disclosure: I work for Disqus and I'm genuinely curious.)

It seems to scale well and it provides a world wide commenting service -- in that sense it's an enormous success.

But from site to site the UI changes, even within a site. Wired often has articles where the various disqus links back to the article is broken.

You seem to want to be a social player with follow, etc., but I've only every seen one person with a follower.

I will get notifications of a response, but no response can be found, the link to the response goes nowhere (or the browser "cannot" find it to position itself properly.)

The load times are becoming terrible and noticeably slow down page load as I watch the disqus icon spin around.

You in some sense violated privacy when you without telling people started enumerating was upvoting.

Often on Chrome, however you inject comments is such that the Chrome find command, c-F, cannot find the comments.

It's hands down one of the better commenting systems out there, but in many ways it's flawed -- that's okay, gives you room to improve.

What I find interesting is that Livefyre seems in some sense to be a clone but whatever choices they made make it seem like commenting is a waste of time.

HTH!

Every now and then I like to be reminded why I put Middle School out of my mind.

You can always remind yourself by going here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/

from my understanding, western school of journalism is about providing both sides' opinions (like public's on molesting priests and the priests' on themselves), while i don't remember a techcrunch article simultaneously doing both - promoting a startup as well as providing an opposite opinion.

The original posts at "theawl" - i wasn't able to read it beyond the first couple of paragraphs, as it is sounds like an incomprehensible blabber to me, something along the lines of an anxious teenager describing his word argument with another teenager.

TC harbors some of the dumbest commentators, and many of them post on their real Facebook account. It's like they don't know how to Internet.

False dichotomy.

In my experience...

They absolutely, positively will not cover you unless you've raised money.

Even if you have stats that blow competitors out of the water - crickets.

It's been demonstrated more than once that their traffic isn't useful to the vast majority of startups (doubly so for B2B companies).

It's a nice thing to have coverage from them. But in no way needed for a successful launch of a company.

I agree it's totally unnecessary for your company, but we haven't raised money and we're a Utah-based b2b company and they've covered us twice.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/vidpresso-wants-to-help-tv-...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/vidpresso-adds-photo-touchs...

Just curious - do you have a dedicated PR person? Contacts? Blind reach-out? AirPR?

I wouldn't say that's true. My unfunded wine startup, Swirl it! (http://swirlitapp.com) was covered by TC, and even had a video interview where we came in and swirled w/Colleen Taylor.

We haven't raised any money to date, and even told TC this. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/swirl-it-wine-app-iphone/

Off topic, but that is a really pretty wine app. You ever thought about pairing with wineries later on to get tasting packs out? After all, you have the data to make informed recommendations, so you might as well sell the wine.

Hey, thanks. We're looking at a couple ways to pair with wineries, the tough part being that the small wineries are the best market, except they're the least experimental. Big wineries have people who understand trying out new venues.

I'd say 90..95 percent of the companies they profile, had raised money. Occasionally, there would be an unfunded/boothstrapped startup - but those are exceptionally rare (less than 1%). I remember those figures from doing basic keyword analysis of their articles a year ago.

But then again - that's expected. You don't expect to see a natural bodybuilder in Muscle Mag. They are the Jersey Shore of startup coverage, and raising a massive round is the only kind of success they recognize.

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