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That's just terrible. As such TechCrunch is very biased and now you have an Apple salesman on board (MG Seigler). I'm just waiting for someone to tear this orga
by neya 14y ago
That's just terrible. As such TechCrunch is very biased and now you have an Apple salesman on board (MG Seigler). I'm just waiting for someone to tear this organization apart, because what they are doing to Journalism is terribly wrong.
You see, Journalism has advanced to a huge extent in the online world. In the real world, a journalist would have to travel places, arrange interviews, and so forth. It's much much hardwork than 'online journalism'. Organizations like TechCrunch and Gizmodo are basically thieves. They don't have to travel anywhere to get the news, they just 'steal' it from goodwill communities like Hackernews and Reddit and make the titles misleading or 'attractive' so they can get more clicks and add bias to it, insert ads wherever possible, and write articles favoring companies that sponsor them. I can list you so many articles that Gizmodo spins up from Hackernews. Less than 10% of their blogposts are fair and original. The rest are just rip-off from non-profit communities like HN. That is just plain wrong.
TechCrunch has never been afraid of admitting being sponsored by companies, infact, Matt has once admitted that he was sponsored by Apple to write a post favoring their technology over a competitors' based on meaningless grounds.
And Gizmodo, needless to say, are pro-apple, no matter what. What is so bad about these organizations are that they are unfair. They are deceiving people. They spend initially huge amounts of time and effort to build this trust with their audience and they just misuse it by writing unfair articles in favor of companies sponsoring them later. They are killing fair journalism. That is just plain wrong.
These organizations are just a shame to Journalism itself. As a journalist, your duty is to report the news as it is, not what you think of the news. No one gives a fuck to what you think of the news. We all have our own opinions, right? Especially infront of a huge audience, there is a moral obligation to be honest, unbiased. You will never find such ethics with TechCrunch or Gizmodo. For example, recently on Gizmodo, you will find pro-Apple articles suggesting comparisons between every single device on this planet concluding Apple is superior in all aspects, but, never any of its disadvantages. iOS was hacked recently (Security hole). When was the last time you read that on TechCrunch or Gizmodo? You didn't, because they didn't write it. Why didn' they write it?
That is why I am not a fan of MG Seigler or Jesus Diaz or anyone else from these shady organizations. They are just a shame to the Journalism community and they share our knowledge and profit out of it by wrong means. They think they are intelligent, but an average HN reader has more knowledge about tech than these biased, paid writers.
I hope TC falls off soon.
- mcantelon 14y ago>they just 'steal' it from goodwill communities like Hackernews and Reddit Reddit sells ads and subscriptions. And I don't see how you can "steal" from aggregators who just link to content other people have created.
- hkmurakami 14y agoI suppose one could argue that "Hackernews" in this case represents the HN users' insights (in the comments) and also the blogs/bloggers whose only aggregator submission destination is HN (making them in a sense entangled with the "HN community" at large).
- danso 14y ago> These organizations are just a shame to Journalism itself. As a journalist, your duty is to report the news as it is, not what you think of the news. No one gives a fuck to what you think of the news. We all have our own opinions, right? Especially infront of a huge audience, there is a moral obligation to be honest, unbiased. You will never find such ethics with TechCrunch or Gizmodo. As a former print journalist, I will just say that what is "just the news" and what is "honest, unbiased" has a coincidentally strong correlation with the reader's personal biases. Case in point, you seem to have selection bias: > For example, recently on Gizmodo, you will find pro-Apple articles suggesting comparisons between every single device on this planet concluding Apple is superior in all aspects, but, never any of its disadvantages. iOS was hacked recently (Security hole). When was the last time you read that on TechCrunch or Gizmodo? You didn't, because they didn't write it. Why didn' they write it? Doing a quick Google search of "Gizmodo" and "Apple", I find quite a few negative-Apple stories. Of the top of my head, I remember that Gizmodo was the publication that leaked the iPhone4 prototype and pushed the Antennagate story hard...not exactly stories that a pro-Apple publication would pursue.
- VonGuard 14y agoSadly, I don't think TC is going anywhere. There's two types of new journalism that have come out of the technology boom and the Internet, and only one of them is worth while. Guess which type TC is... The first type is the good type: the LA Times is a perfect example. Sorry to bring this up, but it is a great example: the Boy Scouts perversion files were released last week: thousands of documents about pedophiles in the Boy Scouts. The LA Times took that data, sorted it, and made it available in a map interface, with searchable text fields and all the documents available behind it. That's the future of journalism: reporting plus data analysis and presentation. TC, on the other hand, is the bad type of new journalism. This is the type where the only thing that matters is timing, not accuracy. In the online world, most news outlets fall into this category. They don't care about facts or the people they're reporting on, all they care about is having the story first, even if only by a few seconds. Engadget has a guy that is the World record holder for world's fastest blogger. They're really proud of this. I think it's actually a horrible shame and missing the point. Anyway, people read the second type of journalism a lot more than the first. And that really sucks. The easiest way to spot a real journalist is if he's on the phone. Real reporters spend all day on the phone talking to people, not on the web reading blogs and emails. I doubt TC ever picks up the phone to call anyone, except to return calls of the "WTF did you write" variety.