Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories? | Hacker News Reader

Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories?

kullin.net

95 pointsnoss29 comments

I've increasingly been viewing TechCrunch as the Bill O'Reilly show of the startup scene. The noise-to-signal ratio and tabloidesque sensationalism is too painful for my own personal tastes.

However, I know lots of people who find it most useful, but I avoid it like the plague.

Agreed, wholeheartedly.

I don't even follow any of the links that pop up around here anymore.

I have been experimentally attempting to avoid reading TechCrunch over the last week and discovered I don't miss it.

Anything important they cover is covered in more detail elsewhere (usually they're just re-reporting something from the WSJ/NYTimes) and surfaced for me either by Techmeme or Hacker News. All of TechCrunch's original reporting is dross, and often inaccurate.

There seems to be this consensus in the tech community that TechCrunch is an industry-shaping dealmaker, but that reputation seems mostly to be coming from TechCrunch itself.

I know it's popular to bash TC on here, and I've long since accepted that it comes with the territory, but this is a pretty ridiculous comment. We frequently break news before the WSJ and NYT.

Case in point: the Google Voice/Apple/AT&T fiasco. We broke the news that Google had submitted their application six weeks ago and subsequently had it rejected. Until then, everyone was under the impression that Google was still "working on it".

Sure there's some bashing, but there are also valid criticisms here.

To me the it's gotten to the point where the cons outweigh the pros. I no longer trust what is written on TC.

Unfortunately we clearly can't trust even your breaking news -- as evidenced by the referenced article -- until it's validated by a more reputable source.

You value getting it first more than getting it right. That might be aligned with TC's business, but not with the better interest of your readers or the public at large.

"We frequently break news before the WSJ and NYT"

That's not so hard when you don't observe the same standards for verifying a story. The impression is that TC simply publishes early and often - statistically, some of it turns out true.

Indeed, the time-honored Drudge Report methodology.

I still read TC and enjoy it most of the time, but I had the same feeling about that emission article. It was just tabloid style.

Before commenting I spent a few minutes browsing the TechCrunch Archives. In doing so, I realized that many headlines seem on target/appropriate - so that is one data point in TC's favor.

That said, TechCrunch has still chosen to publish many sloppy or sensational articles - essentially thumbing their nose at journalistic integrity. I have trouble viewing TC in a positive light after reading through these:

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards

@jkincaid most of these HN comments aren't ignorant/ridiculous bashing but are piecing together some constructive feedback for TC:

Be Truthful

Be Accurate

Be Accountable

You could garner more readership and respect...

Jason, it's probably not worth your time defending yourself here. The anti-TC people are marginalized by PG's attitude on the matter. In short, Techcrunch has problems, but they write stories about startups. Often, good stories.

But what good is that if the information isn't deemed reliable? I read, and enjoy TechCrunch for new product announcements and reviews -- almost exclusively, and don't really need it for much else, but if a significant portion of TC's "breaking news" is unreliable, then it may as well not exist.

I also don't know if breaking news is as important to readers as it is to journalists, for a number of reasons; Notably, I have a certain number of sites that I peruse per day, and I rely on them for the majority of my daily intake. I don't seek out news, and WSJ and NYT aren't on my reading list, while TC is. I frankly wouldn't know the difference if TC broke something an hour (or even a day) earlier than the next guy.

Really though, I think that TC has enough market/mindshare that they should focus much less on breaking sensationalism, and more on reliably reporting news as accurately as they can in the traditionally plain-English fashion that made them famous.

You are kidding right? I have seen NYT and WSJ break more "tech" stories than TechCrunch. Also when did TC move from covering startups to being tabloid central? I am surprised at some of the sensationalism of the headlines and the repeated bashing of the telcos gets old. Why dont you guys learn a thing or two from GigaOm?

"Also when did TC move from covering startups to being tabloid central? "

When advertising revenues started falling, I suspect.

Sheesh,

The original post was complaining about story whose tongue-in-cheek quality one might get after a minute or two's thought. "Google maps don't lie..." Uh, the point is "figures don't lie but liars figure".

You can't trust techcrunch if you can't trust yourself or your friends to figure this stuff out...

And indeed, maybe you can't trust your friends and I can't trust my friends with certain things but if you can't trust yourself to know what to share with who, well stay away from those intertubes...

What really gets me are Schonfeld's replies to those trying to provide additional information with respects to the accuracy of the article. To tell someone to go petition the UN, etc, is really damn ridiculous. It's childish, lazy, and cheap. Sometimes I find TC authors' comments and replies to 'trolls' to be just as trollish.

I'm not a TC bandwaggoner. In fact, I quite like them, and have found the quality of their posts to have increased recently, but little things like this shouldn't happen. Putting in that extra 0.5% of effort to act cordial and double check facts will go a long way.

I just had the pleasure of reading another 'oh my gawd, PR people are so stupid' story over at TC. For me that's the journalistic equivalent of Nietzsche's music of decline.

That latest Twitter fiasco shows what they're all about. I love that publishing virtually meaningless private data (which was stolen) was somehow an expression of their journalistic integrity. Because we needed to know that Twitter plans on being the pulse of the planet? Come on.

They're the tech news equivalent of Cops.

I can't believe everyone on TechCrunch can't see the difference between "highest percentage increase in green house gases" and "worst greenhouse gas emitters"... are they that foolish...

Of course countries that emitted few greenhouse gases have a higher percentage increase because any slight variation is a big one, while USA who is a mammoth when it comes to greenhouse will logically have small percentage changes because it's already huge (similar with GDP changes, 1% of GDP increase in USA is equivalent with 380% of GDP in Sweden for example and so on... btw, bogus numbers just to exemplify).

I was pretty unimpressed when they published stolen Twitter documents after publicly pretending to agonize over the decision. A professional journalist wouldn't have done either of those things.

second that. Techcrunch has been in my zonefile since then pointing to 127.0.0.1 to avoid the temptation.

watch for their journalism to turn a brighter shade of yellow now that the crunchpad is competing with the companies they cover. arrington just wrote a vilifying little piece about getting rid of his iPhone in order to go with a dizzying configuration of beta/vapor options from google voice. this story seems particularly huffy and shows the need for conflict of interest disclosure now.

Stopped reading them months ago, started finding the blogs that are original sources, now I get much better news coverage.

Can you please recommend some of your new findings? It's always interesting to read alternatives to TC.

you can also check http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/ I guess

It's too mainstream for me. 3 million rss subscribers means there's a lot stuff they won't publish because they are trying to please all those subscribers at once, most of the time.

I also wonder about its balance: are there sites, categories and companies that are excluded so as not to jeopardise the IN crowd?

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/01/america-makes-nothin.ht...

Seems like Boingboing made the same mistake of mixing up the original function vs the first derivative.

My defense of TC: in a world where everyone is too scared to voice a clear opinion, TC will tell it to you straight.

When they see torture, they don't say "enhanced interrogation techniques" (http://twitter.com/dangillmor/statuses/933969163)

So many other media outlets will not dare say anything negative about the news they cover.

They don't have the same allegiances as the mainstream media. That doesn't mean they don't have any.

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