Laments

Let’s start out by pointing out the worst part of this: the disclosure issue trickles down into TC's journalists. A FB comment on this article, as written by Alexia Tsotsis: "'It's frustrating to read comments day in and day out about how people think TechCrunch should be, or what it's supposed to say. Arrington's response: It'll say whatever the fuck we want it to, because we're people and we find some stories interesting. That's news.'

Accurate."

This type of stuff makes me want to stop reading TC. Today. Unfortunately, I still think they’re the best at what they do (mostly due to quantity of relevant coverage).

But, to get stuck there would be to ignore the elephant in the room: Arrington. So, to refresh: the original problem wasn't just that Arrington wasn't disclosing, but that he was not running stories and possibly skewing coverage because of it.

So, what does Arrington have to say to defend himself? "But the really important thing to remember, as a reader, is that there is no objectivity in journalism. The guys that say they’re objective are just pretending."

Oooh, that's a top-notch defense. By placing the blame on everybody else, he's hoping that we'll talk about everybody else -- and then ignore him, as if he's the hero by pointing out that other people are conflicted. And, let's be fair here -- he's trying like hell to shut up anyone who criticizes him now or in the future by embarrassing them, and their colleagues, as hard as he can right in the article.

But wait, let's refocus on that last sentence -- and their colleagues. Arrington touches on Kara Swisher, and then after mentioning that she disclosed fully (which she did on the original article; see: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20110428/godspeed-on-that-investi... ) he then attacked her colleague who has no relevance at all to this. To quote Arrington: "One of her writers, Liz Gannes, is married to a Facebook consultant. She covers the company and its competitors regularly. She discloses it as well, but it isn’t clear whether or not her husband has stock in Facebook. That’s something as a reader I’d like to know."

Arrington’s game here is pure deflection with an end-goal of humiliating critics as hard as he can. It’s hard to not feel sorta disgusted here.

And to those of you who say he’s trying to get fired by AOL? I think he is, too. The reason that Arrington stated that he was willing to be bought out by AOL was: "I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software."

But that's hard to believe. CrunchBase isn’t bringing in any revenue (Creative Commons Attribution License) and I doubt it can be monetized. It brings little value for anyone who isn’t interested in angel-seed startup investing.

So, let’s look at Gawker’s analysis of the TechCrunch/AOL deal:

"Although the details of AOL's purchase agreement with TechCrunch have not been released, the consensus is that AOL used a three-year earnout designed to give Arrington and other TechCrunchers an incentive to stick around and do a great job. Based on various reports, we estimate that this earnout could likely amount to $10-$15 million above the original purchase price. $10-$15 million is a significant amount of money, even to Mike Arrington. We suspect, therefore, that even if Arrington gets bored or loathes working for AOL, he won't just quit because that would mean walking away from this cash.

If AOL management gets tired of Arrington's behavior, meanwhile, they presumably can't just fire him, because this would likely trigger a full payment of the earnout. To can Arrington and avoid paying the earnout, AOL would likely have to fire him 'for cause' And given that this behavior is par for Arrington's course, it would be hard to argue that it constituted 'cause'."

So, yes, even though Arrington wrote in 2009 that "one change I’m going to make at TechCrunch is to get rid of all of our investment conflicts. I’ve long been an angel investor and have continued to make a very few investments even after starting TechCrunch. These investments are always disclosed and in my opinion we do more than enough to maintain transparency there. But it’s also a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility. So over the next few months I’m going to divest myself of all of those investments in an orderly fashion, and I’ll update readers on the progress. I’ll also discontinue making any further investments," when you fast forward to 2011, his statement is an implicit admission that he's trying to undermine TechCrunch's credibility:

"I have also become a limited partner in two venture funds, Benchmark Capital and SoftTech VC. I am considering investments in a few other venture funds and a couple of startups as well, but have nothing further to announce yet.... When these investments are complete, in a few months, there’s a very good chance that I’ll be a direct or indirect investor in a lot of the new startups in Silicon Valley, and that will mean that there will be financial conflicts of interests in a lot of my stories. Either because I write about those companies, or write about a competitor, or don’t write about a competitor."

If Arrington's trying to poison the site, and I think he is, I'm going to try to find another news site. It's only going to go downhill from here... with a lot of bluster and paranoia from Arrington against all threats, real or perceived.

This writing has a few awesome hum-dingers: "Like many of the hangovers that haunt modern software engineering, this is ultimately mostly Microsoft’s fault," "Yes, I am being deliberately sexist here, because in my experience those women who write code are consistently good at it," and "So what should a real interview consist of? Let me offer a humble proposal: don’t interview anyone who hasn’t accomplished anything. Ever."

When I read his work, I feel like this author writes in a binary way: Either an entity's right, or they're wrong. Period. (Jon Evans or the highway!)

I disagree with this assertion: "my feeling is that conflict of interest in journalism is between a journalist and his employer, not between a journalist and his readership."

A lot of people view Arrington as the face of TechCrunch and I feel like his stories drive a significant amount of traffic to the portal. I, for one, know that I read stories with his name on it -- even if I'm not terribly interested in them.

But, if Arrington's showing favoritism or is holding back, simply because he's invested in a company, it makes TechCrunch less relevant -- since someone else will break the story, or it may be biased. (And, let's be fair -- nobody expects complete impartiality from an investor. They're already partial, else they wouldn't be investing.)

To quote Arrington, "There’s a period of time with any investment when I know an investment is possible or likely but it can’t be announced yet. During that time I don’t write about the startup at all, because I can’t disclose the investment. When another writer wants to break a story we may have to hold that story, or it becomes a forcing function in announcing sooner." And this is the hart of the debate.

To address your other point: I know many, many, many journalists who have incredible integrity -- just avid news consumers today are becoming disenfranchised by news media (and I'd like to point out that Wikileaks, Twitter, and blogs are none of the above) does not mean that it does not exist. Would you really rather go to the biased news source if the unbiased one was right next to it?

This is the type of decision that is an inflection point -- because Arrington's refusal to stop will allow a lot of tech journalists to begin lobbying hand grenades at any unfavorable TC press ("I sure hope that Arrington doesn't have a hand in that! hahaha.")

Pretty sure they're doing this already; have you guys looked at how this thread is sorted? It's not by time of post, implying that your vote is tallied (and counts).

Things this is missing: Privacy policy, ability to search or differentiate, proof of security, testimonials, terms and conditions, proof that there's any actual people in the database.

Pluses: excludes job seekers!

Interesting sidebar: "We research each seeker request and only send you the best ones." I'm sniffing a discrimination lawsuit in the making.

If it's not seen as rote/generic by those who read it, it's a good memo. If it's seen as "office as usual," it'll work against itself.

This is smart organizational behavior being put into action: while 30 days isn't enough time to meet with most in the company, it shows that the COO is pushing to lead through consensus, and it shows that he's listening to common employee problems.

On Reuters' website, people have been saying that this is a CEO being deceptive; this is not the case. If they think that, either they're too used to corporate communications burning them from this perspective, or they're unused to clear, honest communications. This is a CEO and COO telling employees that there will 1) be change, and 2) it will be mostly a process/managerial change.

By getting employees' assent and respect, it makes eventual-changes easier, and also allows for the regular employees to feel that there is clarity and vision leading them (instead of inexplicable changes that confound both internal employees and external pundits).

To add an unrelated reply to a crowded discussion: I think that what we've seen from Googler manager skillset article in the Times is that Google has had to learn basic managerial attributes organically since that's the Google way -- from this outsider's perspective, it almost sounded like if they didn't invent it, it's hard-to-impossible to adopt given the startup culture.

I think that this board in particular has given Facebook a lot of praise; by this, I mean that there's a fascination/silent cheering for their engineering-driven culture. But I think that we're seeing a transition by Google from a startup (Facebook) to a real company (Microsoft); as much as a "management" layer is derided, a lot of Google's projects seem to have little business value; while they may eventually become valuable, it seems like their strategy has been to shy away from placing limits and directing units towards hard business goals (profitability).

But I'd argue that the rise of "business" being more important than passion-projects (which is what we implicitly view Google as) has been very visible, just ignored. Android's device manufacturers producing under anti-fragmentation clauses comes to mind as a sterling example of a unit posing to follow Google's motto but in reality has them running in the opposite direction (e.g. away from openness).

So, to round back: sure, anything could happen in regard to managers; but Google's in the middle of growing pains, and those pains I believe will end in an increased managerial presence/layer rather than ignored outright.

I'd like to ditto this; the linked article is very speculative, and without a G-employee response, it seems rather foolhardy to extend said speculation.

Before we derail too hard on this article, I would like to take a moment to point out that there's an article ranked higher about how Apple's suing Amazon over the term "App Store"... not like they've sued Microsoft over the term, too. (Also on HN somewhere.)

So, it's not just MS who sues -- but lest we forget, TC needs to be provocative and incite us to be persnickity. That's some high-quality bloggin'.