Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories?

http://www.kullin.net/2009/08/can-you-trust-techcrunch-enough-to.html

by noss • 17 years ago

95 29 17 years ago

I've increasingly been viewing TechCrunch as the Bill O'Reilly show of the startup scene. The noise-to-signal ratio and tabloidesque sensationalism is too painful for my own personal tastes.

However, I know lots of people who find it most useful, but I avoid it like the plague.

javanix• 17 years ago

Agreed, wholeheartedly.

I don't even follow any of the links that pop up around here anymore.

seldo• 17 years ago

I have been experimentally attempting to avoid reading TechCrunch over the last week and discovered I don't miss it.

Anything important they cover is covered in more detail elsewhere (usually they're just re-reporting something from the WSJ/NYTimes) and surfaced for me either by Techmeme or Hacker News. All of TechCrunch's original reporting is dross, and often inaccurate.

There seems to be this consensus in the tech community that TechCrunch is an industry-shaping dealmaker, but that reputation seems mostly to be coming from TechCrunch itself.

jkincaid• 17 years ago

I know it's popular to bash TC on here, and I've long since accepted that it comes with the territory, but this is a pretty ridiculous comment. We frequently break news before the WSJ and NYT.

Case in point: the Google Voice/Apple/AT&T fiasco. We broke the news that Google had submitted their application six weeks ago and subsequently had it rejected. Until then, everyone was under the impression that Google was still "working on it".

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Sheesh,

The original post was complaining about story whose tongue-in-cheek quality one might get after a minute or two's thought. "Google maps don't lie..." Uh, the point is "figures don't lie but liars figure".

You can't trust techcrunch if you can't trust yourself or your friends to figure this stuff out...

And indeed, maybe you can't trust your friends and I can't trust my friends with certain things but if you can't trust yourself to know what to share with who, well stay away from those intertubes...

kyro• 17 years ago

What really gets me are Schonfeld's replies to those trying to provide additional information with respects to the accuracy of the article. To tell someone to go petition the UN, etc, is really damn ridiculous. It's childish, lazy, and cheap. Sometimes I find TC authors' comments and replies to 'trolls' to be just as trollish.

I'm not a TC bandwaggoner. In fact, I quite like them, and have found the quality of their posts to have increased recently, but little things like this shouldn't happen. Putting in that extra 0.5% of effort to act cordial and double check facts will go a long way.

Dauntless2• 17 years ago

I can't believe everyone on TechCrunch can't see the difference between "highest percentage increase in green house gases" and "worst greenhouse gas emitters"... are they that foolish...

Of course countries that emitted few greenhouse gases have a higher percentage increase because any slight variation is a big one, while USA who is a mammoth when it comes to greenhouse will logically have small percentage changes because it's already huge (similar with GDP changes, 1% of GDP increase in USA is equivalent with 380% of GDP in Sweden for example and so on... btw, bogus numbers just to exemplify).

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

I was pretty unimpressed when they published stolen Twitter documents after publicly pretending to agonize over the decision. A professional journalist wouldn't have done either of those things.

jacquesm• 17 years ago

second that. Techcrunch has been in my zonefile since then pointing to 127.0.0.1 to avoid the temptation.

00joe• 17 years ago

Stopped reading them months ago, started finding the blogs that are original sources, now I get much better news coverage.

toni• 17 years ago

Can you please recommend some of your new findings? It's always interesting to read alternatives to TC.

Dauntless2• 17 years ago

you can also check http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/ I guess

mbenjaminsmith• 17 years ago

I just had the pleasure of reading another 'oh my gawd, PR people are so stupid' story over at TC. For me that's the journalistic equivalent of Nietzsche's music of decline.

That latest Twitter fiasco shows what they're all about. I love that publishing virtually meaningless private data (which was stolen) was somehow an expression of their journalistic integrity. Because we needed to know that Twitter plans on being the pulse of the planet? Come on.

They're the tech news equivalent of Cops.

fredBuddemeyer• 17 years ago

watch for their journalism to turn a brighter shade of yellow now that the crunchpad is competing with the companies they cover. arrington just wrote a vilifying little piece about getting rid of his iPhone in order to go with a dizzying configuration of beta/vapor options from google voice. this story seems particularly huffy and shows the need for conflict of interest disclosure now.

alain94040• 17 years ago

My defense of TC: in a world where everyone is too scared to voice a clear opinion, TC will tell it to you straight.

When they see torture, they don't say "enhanced interrogation techniques" (http://twitter.com/dangillmor/statuses/933969163)

So many other media outlets will not dare say anything negative about the news they cover.

extension• 17 years ago

They don't have the same allegiances as the mainstream media. That doesn't mean they don't have any.

adrianwaj• 17 years ago

It's too mainstream for me. 3 million rss subscribers means there's a lot stuff they won't publish because they are trying to please all those subscribers at once, most of the time.

I also wonder about its balance: are there sites, categories and companies that are excluded so as not to jeopardise the IN crowd?

iamwil• 17 years ago

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/01/america-makes-nothin.ht...

Seems like Boingboing made the same mistake of mixing up the original function vs the first derivative.

Can you trust TechCrunch enough to share their stories?

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