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TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

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Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#31

Post by jkaljundi »

JoeP wrote: post #4

I'll be the first to admit that I know very little about the internal structure of TechCrunch in particular (and AOL's web properties more generally) but this article strikes me as being enormously counter-productive. What benefit is there in airing all your dirty laundry like this? Publicly 'shaming' AOL into backing down?

Publicity. Honesty.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#35

Post by sskates »

zalthor wrote: post #6

I'm just surprised that they actually published that on TechCrunch. I would be even more surprised if AOL doesn't have that deleted within the hour.

Too late, it's on the internet. They're not going to delete it because then instead of the title of this story being "TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over" it would instead be "The Article AOL Pulled From TechCrunch: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over". The first rule of getting yourself out of a hole is to stop digging.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#37

Post by valisystem »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #20

Hmm, was just reading "Good to Great" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_to_Great ) about leadership, simplicity and doing what you're good at. Something tells me TechCrunch is not a great company if things are going to collapse this way without Arrington... Oh, and something tells me little oversight for your writers leads to massive internal communication issues like these...

You took a shortcut. I don't think that TC wouldn't work without Arrington, and i don't think it is what Siegler wants to tell us. The problem is not that Arrington is leaving, the problem is that he will be replaced, and not likely by someone that will follow Arrington's way of leading TC. More like pleasing AOL.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#38

Post by noibl »

The notion that Mike, or anyone else, investing in a company would dictate some sort of giant conflicted agenda is laughable. Literally. If Mike tried to get me to write some unreasonable post about a company he had invested in, I would laugh at him. But he would never do that.

No, what's laughable is expecting your readership to rely on your characterisation of your relationship with your editor as a guide to the editorial standards of your publication.

The magic at TechCrunch happens because the writers have very little oversight. Instead, the emphasis is placed on hiring the right writers in the first place

Indeed.

Quite often, you never even see what he brings. But it permeates the entire site.

As readers we have a robust yardstick for presuming bias in reporting: financial interest in the subject. It's important that we do have one and writers who claim otherwise should know that they're demanding a serious indulgence. In contrast to Siegler's tantrum: hxxp://allthingsd.com/author/kara/#kara-ethics

Edit: Strange, the 'ethics statement' content block has to be revealed by manual click. The link is in the article tools menu at the top of the page, in faint text.

Edit2: Traced the content from the AJAX loader to here: http://allthingsd.com/index.php?atd_ajax=authorinfo&fiel...

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#39

Post by JoachimSchipper »

staunch wrote: post #3

TechCrunch's days were numbered the day Arrington sold it to AOL. The honeymoon rarely lasts more than a year, so this is right on time.

You're not being entirely fair to AOL here: Arrington could have just said "no way" to the whole CrunchFund thing and posted a TechCrunch rant if it did go through. That would have made it much harder to sustain accusations of a conflict of interest (the critics are certainly less noisy about TechCrunch's coverage of AOL these days, although that's obviously a no-no according to classical journalist ethics.)

AOL is in no way perfect, but let's not place all the blame on them.

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