7 ms·
TechCrunch: Journalists Or Startup Shills? You Decide
- sscalia 13y agoIn my experience... They absolutely, positively will not cover you unless you've raised money. Even if you have stats that blow competitors out of the water - crickets. It's been demonstrated more than once that their traffic isn't useful to the vast majority of startups (doubly so for B2B companies). It's a nice thing to have coverage from them. But in no way needed for a successful launch of a company.
- randall 13y agoI agree it's totally unnecessary for your company, but we haven't raised money and we're a Utah-based b2b company and they've covered us twice. http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/vidpresso-wants-to-help-tv-stations-put-your-tweets-and-facebook-comments-on-air/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/07/vidpresso-wants-to-help-tv-... http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/vidpresso-adds-photo-touchscreen-support-to-help-bring-twitter-to-tv/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/vidpresso-adds-photo-touchs...
- sscalia 13y agoJust curious - do you have a dedicated PR person? Contacts? Blind reach-out? AirPR?
- nicw 13y agoI wouldn't say that's true. My unfunded wine startup, Swirl it! (http://swirlitapp.com http://swirlitapp.com) was covered by TC, and even had a video interview where we came in and swirled w/Colleen Taylor. We haven't raised any money to date, and even told TC this. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/swirl-it-wine-app-iphone/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/swirl-it-wine-app-iphone/
- solistice 13y agoOff topic, but that is a really pretty wine app. You ever thought about pairing with wineries later on to get tasting packs out? After all, you have the data to make informed recommendations, so you might as well sell the wine.
- nicw 13y agoHey, thanks. We're looking at a couple ways to pair with wineries, the tough part being that the small wineries are the best market, except they're the least experimental. Big wineries have people who understand trying out new venues.
- photorized 13y agoI'd say 90..95 percent of the companies they profile, had raised money. Occasionally, there would be an unfunded/boothstrapped startup - but those are exceptionally rare (less than 1%). I remember those figures from doing basic keyword analysis of their articles a year ago. But then again - that's expected. You don't expect to see a natural bodybuilder in Muscle Mag. They are the Jersey Shore of startup coverage, and raising a massive round is the only kind of success they recognize.
- mathattack 13y agoCan they be both Journalists and Startup shills? Very interesting play by play on the fight over there!
- protomyth 13y agoWell, when they write "Like all start-ups Elite Daily is a mix of hustle, fibbing (or outright lying), and mismanagement. We’ve seen each of the best startups exhibit these traits." they are being a very poor shill and some might question the journalism given that belief.
- liquidise 13y agoGiven the working definitions of "shill" and the cannons of "journalistic integrity" (namely objectivity) are at literal odds... I would say no; you cannot be both.
- austenallred 13y agoI just realized I haven't been to TechCrunch in months. It's rapidly become more of a press release distribution platform than a "journalistic institution." And how much interested traffic is it really driving? Look at the number of comments: 2, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0. It used to be full of (albeit low-quality) comments. I don't think that can be blamed on the commenting platform. As I prepare to launch a startup and close up funding I've made contact with some TC writers, but I don't see a TC writeup as integral to the launch process as it used to be. I don't know if there's anything that would fill that gap -- Show HN, maybe? PandoDaily, kind of? Talk to startups that have been featured there, and they'll be shocked at how little traffic and interest it drove - one app had a full writeup about them and they saw a bump of a couple hundred downloads. TC is as much of an ego-rub for the founders as it is anything else at this point.
- rfnslyr 13y agoI never read any startup news or any of that nonsense, I don't read 90% of HN blogs. So pointless. If your product is good, people will tell each other, and it will spread.
- Koulia 13y agoThank you for sharing that with the rest of us.
- stephengillie 13y agoThese blogs are one way how people tell each other.
- potch 13y agoI have your medal here, just waiting for an address to send it to.
- minimaxir 13y agoTechCrunch lost comments not because of traffic, but because they switched to the barely-functional LiveFyre commenting system. (yeah, correlation != causation, but the drop happened immediately after.) The previous Facebook Comments system had limited functionality, but it atleast worked. I've written articles on it [1]. Yes, I have no life. Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch. [1] http://www.quora.com/Max-Woolf-2/What-does-Max-Woolf-think-about-TechCrunchs-decision-to-stop-using-Facebook-comments http://www.quora.com/Max-Woolf-2/What-does-Max-Woolf-think-a...
- benologist 13y agoTechCrunch are nothings now. This year every major story has gone through AllThingsD and other sources, with TechCrunch rushing to post a rewrite. All they have left is soft-serve YC press releases, major startups posting minor updates, and generic shit like the rest of AOL's content farm churns out. I won't be at all surprised when next year they announce TechCrunch is re-launching as a category on Engadget who are actively pursuing startups and are much better at spewing out rewordings and zero-impact articles.
- minimaxir 13y agoTechCrunch head editor Alexia Tsotsis published a succinct response here: https://medium.com/p/dbe10eb0874b https://medium.com/p/dbe10eb0874b Disclosure: I'm a rather frequent commenter on TechCrunch.
- btrautsc 13y agoI respect this follow up... I think she gets it. But I feel the "rewrote press release" isn't that unusual. Disclosure: A previous startup of mine was covered on TechCrunch. It was a rewritten press release... It felt so good.
- freshhawk 13y agoImpressively honest at least. Calling it "inside baseball" is definitely sour grapes though. The whole post seems to say that rewriting a press release and then doing a crappy job of trying to "dig deeper" is a small thing rather than a complete inability to do what you promise to do by calling people "reporters".
- achompas 13y agoLove this because, if nothing else, The Awl's writers can...write...circles around the TC crew.
- pbreit 13y agoI had trouble reading The Awl's piece. Seemed verbose and off-point.
- VladRussian2 13y agofrom my understanding, western school of journalism is about providing both sides' opinions (like public's on molesting priests and the priests' on themselves), while i don't remember a techcrunch article simultaneously doing both - promoting a startup as well as providing an opposite opinion. The original posts at "theawl" - i wasn't able to read it beyond the first couple of paragraphs, as it is sounds like an incomprehensible blabber to me, something along the lines of an anxious teenager describing his word argument with another teenager.
- rhokstar 13y agoI boycotted TechCrunch since the quality of their journalism has dropped (circa 2010). Then Arrington leaves and now its an empty shell.
- jerrya 13y agoWhy is Disqus a thriving though flawed comment platform and Livefyre a seemingly dead and flawed comment platform? I don't bother commenting on sites with Livefyre as do most people, it seems.
- minimaxir 13y agoIt should be noted that LiveFyre has a "SocialSync" feature which syndicates comments from the owner's Facebook page, which may inflate the comment count. It is a terrible feature.
- bentlegen 13y agoHow's it flawed? (Disclosure: I work for Disqus and I'm genuinely curious.)
- jerrya 13y agoIt seems to scale well and it provides a world wide commenting service -- in that sense it's an enormous success. But from site to site the UI changes, even within a site. Wired often has articles where the various disqus links back to the article is broken. You seem to want to be a social player with follow, etc., but I've only every seen one person with a follower. I will get notifications of a response, but no response can be found, the link to the response goes nowhere (or the browser "cannot" find it to position itself properly.) The load times are becoming terrible and noticeably slow down page load as I watch the disqus icon spin around. You in some sense violated privacy when you without telling people started enumerating was upvoting. Often on Chrome, however you inject comments is such that the Chrome find command, c-F, cannot find the comments. It's hands down one of the better commenting systems out there, but in many ways it's flawed -- that's okay, gives you room to improve. What I find interesting is that Livefyre seems in some sense to be a clone but whatever choices they made make it seem like commenting is a waste of time. HTH!
- Miyamoto 13y agoTC harbors some of the dumbest commentators, and many of them post on their real Facebook account. It's like they don't know how to Internet.
- eitally 13y agoStartup shills. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't perform any journalism, or that they don't aspire to be journalists, but the news they've chosen to coverage depends highly on their sources choosing them as the primary outlet for news. That used to make sense, but not anymore, and especially not since 1) Big Media have taken tech coverage seriously, 2) FAR superior sites like Ars & The Verge provide much better general technical cover for the same or similar things, and 3) there are a plethora of niche blogs/sites that delve deeper still into the minutiae of nearly anything you could imagine (consider android police, androinica, phandroid, android guys, android atlas, andcentral, ...). Imho, TC isn't the only one suffering -- Mashable, Pandodaily, etc aren't exactly getting the new hotness first, either.
- boha 13y agoFalse dichotomy.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoEvery now and then I like to be reminded why I put Middle School out of my mind.
- mbesto 13y agoYou can always remind yourself by going here: http://valleywag.gawker.com/ http://valleywag.gawker.com/
- ryguytilidie 13y agoLast two companies I worked with, the ceo was close with a TC writer and would basically just forward them press releases to put up. They are absolutely shills, but we have to ask if journalists are any different outside of tech.