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This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.
He didn't trick them. He stilled emailed them. That headline makes no sense.
So in order to "trick" techcruch into writing about your website, you made a more interesting website that techcrunch would write about which would in turn, help you gain enough leverage for them to write about your other website. This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.
"Start with a large fortune..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don't forget, while it is unethical to intentionally deceive a reporter, a large part of a journalist's job is to vet sources and do some research to make sure claims are true. In reality, blogs make their money on advertising so if they publish downright fabrications or knowingly stretch the truth, they do not care as long as they are getting clicks. In other words, don't feel bad for the blogs.
Not sure if you're saying this was unethical, but what I emailed them was 100% true. It's just that I disclosed only one reason for starting BetaList (wanting a platform like that) and not the other one (wanting to leverage TechCrunch's article to also promote my own startup). Whether that's deceit depends on whether you consider the other reason being relevant to TechCrunch. As far as they were concerned they wrote…
What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's.
If I send a bogus tip to the Washington Post and they immediately run a story on it without question, that's incredibly irresponsible on their part and the fault lies with them. That may seem like an unlikely scenario, but the same thing happens on a daily basis on blogs and slightly lesser-known news outlets with readership in the millions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.
The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.
There's a great IFTTT trigger that takes betali.st startups and adds them into an email[1]. I have it directed to a folder in my mail which I go through once in a while to find good products I like. [1]: https://ifttt.com/myrecipes/personal/678098
Keep in mind we publish about 4-5 startups a day, so if it's too much we also offer an 'official' newsletter which you'll receive either daily or weekly depending on your preferences. http://betalist.com/newsletter
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure if you're saying this was unethical, but what I emailed them was 100% true. It's just that I disclosed only one reason for starting BetaList (wanting a platform like that) and not the other one (wanting to leverage TechCrunch's article to also promote my own startup). Whether that's deceit depends on whether you consider the other reason being relevant to TechCrunch. As far as they were concerned they wrote…
Certainly not. I don't think there's anything unethical about what you described. What I wrote was in response to the notion that he would be angered had you actually "tricked" TechCrunch into writing about you. They, after all, are the one's publishing the story so if they print information that is untrue that they didn't bother vetting, that's their fault, not anybody else's. If I send a bogus tip to the Washington…
(In this case there was not much to vet for TechCrunch of course as they could see what I described exist)
So in order to "trick" techcruch into writing about your website, you made a more interesting website that techcrunch would write about which would in turn, help you gain enough leverage for them to write about your other website. This is like writing a guide on how to obtain 1 million dollars and the first step being to obtain 5 million dollars.