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Externally, it feels like Arrington is Darth Vader when he makes mistakes like this Last.fm one. He has power. But in person, when you abstract away the manufac
by dcurtis 17y ago
Externally, it feels like Arrington is Darth Vader when he makes mistakes like this Last.fm one. He has power. But in person, when you abstract away the manufactured opinions you have created based on his writing, you realize he's just another startup founder. A smart, interesting one. His startup just happens to be TechCrunch. I think lots of people, for some reason, forget that.
I like Arrington a lot. He knows how to play the game in his industry, and that's why he's successful. You can't really blame him for that, from an entrepreneurial point of view (despite the moral implications). Every startup founder needs to know how to play their game. Plenty of YC companies have done questionably moral things to gain traffic/attention.
That doesn't justify TechCrunch's gossip posts, but it provides me with a satisfactory rationalization for the behavior.
- tptacek 17y agoI don't have an Arrington problem. I will probably never meet him. I could care less if he's a jerk. What I have is a future-of-trade-journalism problem. Specifically: * There's no apparent separation of editorial and reporting at TC. * There's no apparent rules about sourcing and attribution at TC. * There's no corrections policy at TC. Long story short, it's a blog. But people like us, acting en masse, have imbued it with many times the power of a real trade press outlet. Of course TC can get more done more cheaply than ZD. They don't play by the same rules.