4 ms·

Oh its a basic journalistic trick. Each journalist wants to give the impression that they see both sides of each story. But if they have a hot story they really

by hristov 17y ago

Oh its a basic journalistic trick. Each journalist wants to give the impression that they see both sides of each story. But if they have a hot story they really do not want to wait to hear the other side. So they request a comment, wait an unreasonably short time, and then print the story saying "we requested a comment from the other side but they did not provide a comment by the deadline for this story".

jacquesm 17y ago
Exactly. Whenever you read 'did not return message seeking comment' or 'could not be reached for comment' you really should read 'we try to make it seem like we tried but they didn't care in order to make ourselves more important'. And it puts the pressure on the parties of who they 'request comment' to replay, knowing that if they don't that that dreaded sentence will be in the article, effectively a small component in the trial by media arena. There are other examples of such code phrases but this one is particularly annoying. As though everybody in the world should be at the beck and call of the media, and doing nothing is already a strike against you. Sure, if a politician stonewalls on a subject call them out for it. But don't use that phrase every second article in order to make it seem that the media are something you ignore at your peril. Plenty of people are loathe to talk to reporters simply out of - justified - fear of being misquoted.
- jacquesm 17y ago
  s/replay/reply/ too late to edit. sorry.
marcusbooster 17y ago
It used to be that there was a set deadline to respond because of a broadcast time or a printing run. A responsible journalist would call for a comment and if they weren't available they'd let them know when the story had to be done. So here we are when the "journalists" are controlling the printing runs and in this case they thought 24 minutes was a fair time for a response. I think this speaks more about the level of journalism practiced at TechCrunch than anything else, and this Facebook prank actually goes a long way to show that. What kinda baffles me is that all those old deadlines were set by management, the reporters always wanted more time to craft the story and get it right. There were epic battles between reporters and editors over time versus distribution. Now that there's instant publishing the reporters have the same itchy trigger fingers. Just like the before everyone's afraid of being "scooped".
- rapind 17y ago
  That's a really good point. I'd argue though that web journalists running their own site are also wearing the management hat and are more concerned with the bottom line than the journalist of old who had that bottom line abstracted form them through bureaucracy. This is just as much a problem with the average consumer's attention span as the content producer's race to print. If this is their policy on stories and yet we still read them and comment on them, well then I guess we value the quick fix even though we complain about it.
cdibona 17y ago
Yeah, most recently, I was asked on a sunday night at 7pm pst for a story that went to publication/web posting the following morning. God forbid I should skip email for a night, right?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  The press can really suck. There are really good reporters and there are terrible ones. Some will go out of their way to get you to say what they want you to say even if it takes cutting your words completely out of context. I'm completely out of the spotlight and happy about that, but there was a time when that was not the case. My policy was very simple. You can print it after I sign off on it otherwise no deal. Cost me a couple of interviews but on the whole it paid off in that I got some control over the process. Some of these things are misunderstandings, especially when matters are technical, but there are also examples of more deliberate misrepresentations. Be careful.
  - scott_s 17y ago
    The difficulty with that policy is that old-school journalists (the NYT, WP, NPR types) would never agree to that either. Unless, of course, they did. Were all your dealings with online tech press, or any (ahem) real press?
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Dutch newspapers, magazines. Volkskrant, AD, Quote Magazine and a whole bunch of others. Quite possible that that would not be a feasible strategy abroad.
qeorge 17y ago
True, but it sounds like TC has a pretty tight relationship with FB's PR team. If they got the request in the 24 minutes you can be sure they ignored it, or it would have ruined the whole joke. I still can't believe the fake feature actually worked. That's a brilliant prank.
evansolomon 17y ago
I think a lot of the responses to this are really unfair. First, this isn't something that is possibly detrimental to the company (Facebook) so printing it without hearing their "side of the story" is extremely low risk. Second, they're reporting something factual. Ignore the fact that there was a bit of a trick in who saw the feature. There was a button on the site, this wasn't an unconfirmed rumor or anything like that. TechCrunch asked for more information on the featured, they didn't get it, and they wrote a story based on what they had observed themselves. The idea that they in some way were being sleazy or should have waited longer to be fair to Facebook is just silly. If this was a material issue that Facebook wanted to comment on, they would have. This happened during normal business hours, not in the middle of the night on a weekend. Facebook PR is a well run machine. For a bit of context, I run our PR/marketing at Justin.tv and when I get requests like this the first thing I do is call the reporter, usually within a minute. That is my job and the nature of reporting is that timeliness is incredibly valuable. If I ignored that and didn't respond as fast as possible I wouldn't be doing my job.

by hristov 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Exactly. Whenever you read 'did not return message seeking comment' or 'could not be reached for comment' you really should read 'we try to make it seem like we tried but they didn't care in order to make ourselves more important'. And it puts the pressure on the parties of who they 'request comment' to replay, knowing that if they don't that that dreaded sentence will be in the article, effectively a small component in the trial by media arena. There are other examples of such code phrases but this one is particularly annoying. As though everybody in the world should be at the beck and call of the media, and doing nothing is already a strike against you. Sure, if a politician stonewalls on a subject call them out for it. But don't use that phrase every second article in order to make it seem that the media are something you ignore at your peril. Plenty of people are loathe to talk to reporters simply out of - justified - fear of being misquoted.

jacquesm 17y ago
s/replay/reply/ too late to edit. sorry.

marcusbooster 17y ago

It used to be that there was a set deadline to respond because of a broadcast time or a printing run. A responsible journalist would call for a comment and if they weren't available they'd let them know when the story had to be done. So here we are when the "journalists" are controlling the printing runs and in this case they thought 24 minutes was a fair time for a response. I think this speaks more about the level of journalism practiced at TechCrunch than anything else, and this Facebook prank actually goes a long way to show that. What kinda baffles me is that all those old deadlines were set by management, the reporters always wanted more time to craft the story and get it right. There were epic battles between reporters and editors over time versus distribution. Now that there's instant publishing the reporters have the same itchy trigger fingers. Just like the before everyone's afraid of being "scooped".

rapind 17y ago
That's a really good point. I'd argue though that web journalists running their own site are also wearing the management hat and are more concerned with the bottom line than the journalist of old who had that bottom line abstracted form them through bureaucracy. This is just as much a problem with the average consumer's attention span as the content producer's race to print. If this is their policy on stories and yet we still read them and comment on them, well then I guess we value the quick fix even though we complain about it.

cdibona 17y ago

Yeah, most recently, I was asked on a sunday night at 7pm pst for a story that went to publication/web posting the following morning. God forbid I should skip email for a night, right?

jacquesm 17y ago
The press can really suck. There are really good reporters and there are terrible ones. Some will go out of their way to get you to say what they want you to say even if it takes cutting your words completely out of context. I'm completely out of the spotlight and happy about that, but there was a time when that was not the case. My policy was very simple. You can print it after I sign off on it otherwise no deal. Cost me a couple of interviews but on the whole it paid off in that I got some control over the process. Some of these things are misunderstandings, especially when matters are technical, but there are also examples of more deliberate misrepresentations. Be careful.
- scott_s 17y ago
  The difficulty with that policy is that old-school journalists (the NYT, WP, NPR types) would never agree to that either. Unless, of course, they did. Were all your dealings with online tech press, or any (ahem) real press?
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Dutch newspapers, magazines. Volkskrant, AD, Quote Magazine and a whole bunch of others. Quite possible that that would not be a feasible strategy abroad.

qeorge 17y ago

True, but it sounds like TC has a pretty tight relationship with FB's PR team. If they got the request in the 24 minutes you can be sure they ignored it, or it would have ruined the whole joke. I still can't believe the fake feature actually worked. That's a brilliant prank.

evansolomon 17y ago

I think a lot of the responses to this are really unfair. First, this isn't something that is possibly detrimental to the company (Facebook) so printing it without hearing their "side of the story" is extremely low risk. Second, they're reporting something factual. Ignore the fact that there was a bit of a trick in who saw the feature. There was a button on the site, this wasn't an unconfirmed rumor or anything like that. TechCrunch asked for more information on the featured, they didn't get it, and they wrote a story based on what they had observed themselves. The idea that they in some way were being sleazy or should have waited longer to be fair to Facebook is just silly. If this was a material issue that Facebook wanted to comment on, they would have. This happened during normal business hours, not in the middle of the night on a weekend. Facebook PR is a well run machine. For a bit of context, I run our PR/marketing at Justin.tv and when I get requests like this the first thing I do is call the reporter, usually within a minute. That is my job and the nature of reporting is that timeliness is incredibly valuable. If I ignored that and didn't respond as fast as possible I wouldn't be doing my job.