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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

#91
post #7

> TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over Nope, still dramatic and hyperbolic as ever!

dramatic, hyperbolic, AND pointless!

The title subtly implies TechCrunch may be over, but really it only says TechCrunch will change because of the "As We Know It" clause. You are losing a editor-in-chief, things will change, duh?

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#92
post #83
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to question what your agenda is as a (former?) TechCrunch writer. Are you perhaps trying to curry favour ahead of the launch of your "pre-launch startup" (from your profile)? You certainly seem eager to mischaracterize my comments and malign my intentions when we've already gone from "every time" to "once before". While you're at it, point out where the comment is "copy and paste[d]" elsewhere. Since you can't…

No - all this comes down to is that your comment has literally nothing to do with the OP, isn't the first time you have made the comment, and in any other circumstance would have been downvoted into negative territory because it doesn't meet a single guideline of this site

How does this have nothing (in italics) to do with the OP? If it's true, it's the whole story!

Ps I did not down vote.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#93
post #59

There is no logical reason to believe that an AOL/Arrington backed VC fund could be anything other than a conflict of interest. In any sane universe, Mike Arrington would actually step down and announce his choice to leave TC because of this potential conflict.

A somewhat amusing related anecdote here, is the way Arrington managed to get Leo Laporte to blow up on him a couple of years ago by prodding him about receiving a review unit and the implications that might have on bias:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsV-lgnAjps

I'd have to say that's a sight different from having a personal stake in companies you or your company are writing about.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#94
post #88

Whenever I read one of these TC articles claiming that apparent conflicts of interest are laughable, I'm amazed, mainly because I accept the claim for a couple of paragraphs before I blink several times and wonder, what on earth am I thinking?! It seems passionate and outraged hyperbole can take my eyes off the rabbit temporarily. You can't make conflicts of interest go away just by saying, "No, but he's a really hon…

Yeah, MG's comment itself was laughable. And that's not disrespecting TC or it's writers, it's just human. Whether or not undisclosed conflicts are a worse problem is orthogonal.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#96
post #71
post #67

Look this is all pretty simple: Mike wants to get fired. Last year, Mike decided to cash out. According to the AOL CEO there had been previous attempts to buy TechCrunch. So one day Mike, who largely covers Silicon Valley, decides to move from San Francisco to... Seattle [1]. His stated reason? Largely, to "mix things up in my life". Washington state, by some amazing coincidence also has no state income tax. Around t…

It absolutely is not illegal for a US citizen to change his state of residence purely for tax reasons. It's only fraud if he does not actually intend to reside there, the motivation behind that intent is completely irrelevant.

You might be able to get in trouble for it though if you had an agreement with another party that you would sell your business to them 1 year in the future (i.e. after changing your residency). The courts might rule that this agreement constituted a sale of the business and that tax should be payable based on residency at the time the agreement was made. I'm not sure if that's actually the case, but I've seen similar rulings in related circumstances.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#97
post #53

I am a big fan of TC and of Arrington. Yes, he is not to everyone's liking, but he has built an amazing business from nothing. However, I have a problem with AOL & TechCrunch forming a startup fund. TC has a huge impact on the startup market. They are the most powerful tech news business in the world and can literally move the market on a startup with a single blog post. If it is positive your user numbers sky rocket…

> TC has a huge impact on the startup market. They are the most powerful tech news business in the world and can literally move the market on a startup with a single blog post. In my experience this is exaggerated. What TC can do is put you on the radar with early adopters for 24 hours. This does not make or break your company. Awareness is only one small problem you have, and TC readers are some of the least sticky…

Totally agree that TC will not 'make or break' your company. The beauty of being a startup is that you are judged primarily on your product. It is as pure a meritocracy as you will find. This is why I love it.

However, TC has become very powerful. Even Googles General Counsel speaks directly to them (http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/25/google-patent-fight). Yes the influence is not a binary 'pass' or 'fail', but it is significant enough for the CrunchFund to benefit from their writing.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#98
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 i…

There's no need to be fair to AoL. Its record speaks for itself.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#99
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.

I'm personally of the opinion that there's a finite number of times that I'm willing to tolerate "histrionic linkbait" headlines.

From tech crunch and a number of other providers that find themselves in the top spot on HN I've personally stopped logging through to the actual article until I've at least read a few comments.

Does the discussion warrant my heading through to the full source? Usually, no.

I know that from the general success of these pages and places like Fox News, there seems to be a near-enough-bottomless appetite for histrionic linkbait in the news, so I'm pretty sure it's never going to go away.

Part of me however wonders if there is any correlation between those posts we see from time to time entitled "I'm leaving Hackernews forever" or "Hacker News has gone downhill" and the number of high-drama BS posts that make it onto the front page over a particular timespan. Maybe it's just cumulative over time, you eventually have your "fill" and leave.

I guess I'm kinda just rambling a bit... but it seems to me that TC puts out a lot of noise. Was "angelgate" pre-AOL ? Maybe it's always been that way.

Re: TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

#100
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.

100%. So how long for arrianna then?

Arianna was the one who announced that Arrington would no longer be doing TechCrunch now that he was doing CrunchFund. The higher-ups at AOL were apparently on board with the plan for him to do both up until then.

I don't have any inside information, but one possible interpretation is that Arianna made this announcement to effectively force AOL to choose to either back her or back Arrington. They seem to have backed her, which has strengthened her control over the content engine that more or less drives the current AOL. With both Arrington and Topolsky gone (along with much of Topolsky's team), there's really not anyone there with the stature to challenge her in this area.

Honestly, it looks like she could be positioning herself to be the successor when Armstrong gets the boot for the current straits AOL finds itself in. Why leave the company when you can just run it?

Edit: Huffington clarifying Arrington's (non-)role: http://www.businessinsider.com/mike-arrington-no-longer-work...

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