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That Elevator Goes Up and Down
Each week I am asked when I will "beat" Techcrunch. My answer is always the same – that I don’t want to beat them currently and, more importantly, the game is setup to keep the top on top. Whether it’s bonus points on Gabe’s blog or Ev giving them 100k bonus followers on Twitter, all of it helps to overcome any bumps in the road. I also include a note in my reply that there is one thing that may eventually remove Techcrunch from the top and that is Techcrunch.
If we look back to December, it seems that this latest batch of issues started with the made up fights between Editor Michael Arrington and Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur. From there we move forward to DLD where allegedly Arrington was spat on by an attendee.
Shortly thereafter Arrington noted that he was leaving for a month. You can keep up with his vacation via daily photos on his Posterous account. Wherever he is, the weather and scenery in the photos are certainly beautiful!
Let’s fast-forward to February which seems to be plagued with various reader issues. First we have Robin Wauters’ posting an image which readers called "homophobic". It took some time for the image to be removed and only when readers demanded an apology did a very generic apology come.
Editor Erick Schonfeld posted a hit-job on DEMO this month as well. I wondered if Techcrunch was perhaps getting desperate by attacking a person who decided to shift focus after running the conference for 13 years.
Sarah Lacy was brought in as a temporary writer and so far her posts overall haven’t been well received. Readers have noted that most seem to be self-promotional. For example, her title on the Facebook privacy story was only part of the story – it’s not about whether they own your data but what they do with their license along with how your sharing my data applies to their license but readers noted she made sure to pump her tv appearance. More on the Facebook topic in a later post. To me it seems like, unfortunately, she hasn’t learned much from last year’s "interview". My post from last year could easily apply this year as well.
Last (no pun intended) we have the current storm about Last.fm and sharing data with the RIAA. In case you haven’t seen the post, Schonfeld posted a rumor suggesting that Last.fm sent data about a U2 album to the RIAA. Schonfeld said he contacted Last.fm and RIAA but rather wait for comment, he went ahead and posted. What followed was an unbelievably stern and strong reaction from CBS (last.fm parent) and the RIAA. Robert Andrews at PaidContent has a good recap of the events.
As of the time of this posting there’s been no official reply from Techcrunch. I also think that Last.fm’s reply was not as professional as I would have thought a major media company like CBS would issue. No reason for cursing – I am not a fan of cursing to make a point – it’s just cheap pops and takes away from the strength of the message which in this case is very strong by itself.
The real reason I wrote this post has very little to do with Techcrunch at all. It’s about the importance today of thinking before submitting. It’s about always remembering that what you say online will be in your "personnel file" forever. I’ve written about this before with regards to CEO behavior. Don’t watch a few current "celebrities" and think that because they can say or do whatever they want, that you can too. In fact, most of the current celebs won’t be celebs in a few years and will wish that they didn’t say many of the things they did.
I touched on the topic of what readers take away with regards to the blogosphere’s love for Twitter and what it does to the psychology of new developers.
Everyone has to get away from emotional postings – they never work and you can’t take them back.
When you screw up on your blog or the customers of your startup believe you have screwed up, apologize. And if you do apologize, mean it. For example, when the founder of Magnolia apologized, you could feel how genuine it was. It’s acceptable to admit when you make errors or miscalculations. What’s great about the Web is that we are all willing to help you back up.
I leave you with this phrase from the Honeymooners, "You better be nice to people on the way up…. because you will see the same people on the way down".
Thanks Morgan – funny note – they are talking about JP Morgan on the tv now – saying that they are doing a good job during the economic mess :)
I totally agree about staying away from these type of posts. Trust me, when you see these type of posts, they are posts I’ve thought about a lot – for example this one I actually thought about while trying to go to sleep the previous night.
I would much rather talk about your startup, my startup, what’s happening with x or y technology.
Allen, I think you are on the mark here, and plenty of anti-TC sentiment is well-deserved. I spew it probably too much, instead of just ignoring it.
However– I think I, and I would imagine many other people, ended up here because of the foil you provide to the TC-style. Generally positive, friendly, interesting over snarky, etc. Bottom line, while I am reading I am generally thinking you’re likely a nice guy in person. So it ends up being a slightly healthier read for me.
Not to say you should adjust your blog for my blood pressure, but I doubt I’m the only one that cares more about the technology than the tiny little world that produces tech news. Keep up your good work, try to stay positive, and I think you’re going to be better off in the long run. I know that same point was part of your post, but just want to throw my two cents in to reiterate it.
Take care.
Great post Allen. I think you summed it up well and connect the dots. I think the Time magazine review was very harsh. I wonder why?
Thanks for the article and the perspective!
great overview of why erick is losing it lately.
Getting favors on Gabe’s blog? Assuming you’re not talking about his blog but his web service (Techmeme), we’ve earned every headline we’ve ever gotten on there.
Ev ‘giving’ us new followers on Twitter? Never asked, never suggested, never demanded. Twitter management’s choice. Sorry, conspiracy theorists.
Mike was not spat on at Davos, it was the DLD conference.
It took (and I dare anyone to say it’s not true) 40 to 50 seconds for the ‘homophobic’ image to be removed from my post. ‘Some time’ is just skewing the facts. I apologized in comments, in the blog and personally to every single commentor and blogger who pointed me to the fact that the guy I took the image from contained the word ‘fags’, if I had contact details.
Sarah Lacy’s posts have been very well received, you shouldn’t only look at the negative comments you want to see. There’s a silent majority that very much enjoys her writings, and a not so silent audience that says so in comments and e-mails to our staff. You’re just reading the feedback you want to read.
‘At the time of this writing’ Erick had already updated the Last.fm post with more comments from him about the whole situation. I’ll leave the rest of this story up to him, he’s biting into it like I expected him to.
All the points I’m making show that you are extremely biased about reporting on anything TechCrunch does (for whatever reason), and I’m always surprised to see you take the higher moral ground when it comes to anything related to social media when you blocked me from following you on Twitter even though you know very well we’ve never had any differences.
Do with this information whatever you want.
Let me reply to each of your comments Robin – and btw you and me, you’d be better off to just write on the blog and not act as their spokesperson. I think it will help you in the long term (and I mean that honestly and genuinely). And that goes for anyone writing on a blog they don’t own.
– I never said that Twitter gave TC more followers because anyone from TC asked, etc. I am saying TC was given more and that is helping TC bigtime.
– Aah – thanks for the correction, will change to DLD instead of davos – there was so much bickering it seemed like I forgot that there were two conferences there.
– I know you took down the image and offered a "we" apology. It would have been better to just say "I screwed up" – I am pretty sure Heather had nothing to do with it for example.
– I can tell you that Sarah’s posts haven’t been well received. I’ve received enough unsolicited emails and instant messages telling me so. I read all the feedback and saw the positive as well.
– Yea, it will be interesting to see what happens next from the last.fm posts. It’s got to be a hot topic internally at TC about how to proceed. As I noted I think they went a bit too far with their reply (especially the topic).
– I removed the block – I can’t remember exactly why I blocked you but I think it had to do with some story and linking – but I forget which.
Thanks for providing your thoughts on my post.
- I’m not a spokesperson, I’m a person whose name was mentioned in a post, and I’m responding to it non-anonymously. And I genuinely and honestly don’t need anyone to tell me what to write or not write on TC.
- ” the game is setup to keep the top on top” is not stating facts, it’s opinion. At least back it up with *something* if you’re going to make a big deal out of it.
- we all got e-mails separately, and we all apologized. It’s called a team. I can’t tell you how much positive response I got from the LBGTQ community for apologizing sincerely and personally. And mind you, that I did not even create a bigot image nor spread any bigotry.
- TC has a massive audience, as has Sarah. There are haters, there are lovers. It’s just the way it goes. Her posts have not been particularly well or poorly received, they’ve just been received. I do not let your IM contact list and inbox judge Lacy’s writings, I’m just saying I see the positive (and yes, the negative) incoming at TC. It comes with the territory, and I hope some day you will experience that and learn from it.
- Last.fm is definitely not a particularly hot topic internally. Erick can handle himself perfectly. We have people slamming us every day, this is not new. He’s watching all the feedback and at the same time looking into the story deeper, they way it should be.
- I’m trying hard not to get pissed off, but don’t ever accuse me of not linking to a source for a story again, ever. And you don’t have to unblock me, I’m just letting you know you’re not better than any of the bloggers you read, so don’t take the higher moral ground.
thanks for the follow-up
I am not a Sarah hater but I did buy her book and was suprised that for someone on the inside her facts were so far off.
She comes across as a valley groupie not a reporter.
Its a shame but thats the facts perhaps she should cover tech for the likes of rollingstone as thats more her level.
No shit, Robin. But if you don’t recognize how a huge blog like TechCrunch benefits from the favorite-son treatment it gets in places like TechMeme and Twitter, it calls your judgment on other subjects into question.
The idea that TechCrunch has "earned" all of that is absurd. Additionally, the hostility you’re showing in your responses kind of makes the point of this post. You wouldn’t be so combative if things were going swimmingly at your site.
What ‘favorite-son’ treatment? I honestly want to know.
And I’m not being hostile, I’m pointing out the many holes in Allen’s assertions because someone needs to do that, too.
Sites like TechCrunch benefit from the large number of sites and aggregators that rank blogs by popularity (most links, most followers, most anything). This makes them more popular and makes it harder for a rival to get anywhere close to it in traffic — once you’re on top, you stay there.
The reinforcement of popularity is what makes it hard for me to accept the notion that TechCrunch “earned” all of its traffic. Sure, some of the success was earned, but it also benefits from a fundamental weakness of blogging: there aren’t nearly as many tools to discover new blogs as there are listing the most popular ones.
Well written Allen, I love the way you summed up all the events “In spite of the mistakes that were corrected by Robin” and I do have some points that I want to talk about.
First, TC is one of my favorite tech blogs, that’s a fact, but recently, it did give me some reasons to stop following most of the articles and that’s because I felt like most of the articles were not well prepared, I expect famous blogs like TC to check every single word and source and not care about who gets the news first, I would prefer to read an article on a startup that was lunched a week ago if it was will written than an article that was posted after the lunch by 5 hours with just little information on that startup.
Second, As a starting teenage blogger I take famous bloggers like Mike, Robin, Scoble as my role models, I try to observe what they do,and it would seriously hurt their image and rep. in my mind if they start acting like a big headed rockstar, Mike saw that coming when he was at LeWeb making fun of the European startups on their own ground, bad move with bad consequences, I believe that you guys “famous bloggers” need to be more helpful and caring about your community if you want to stay at the top, making your own community angry is not going to get you anywhere but downhill.
Third, can’t we all just get along together and try to think of stuff bigger than this, if everyone is doing what he/she is supposed to be doing I don’t think we would be having this conversation anyways.
Thank you Allen, and I love how you care about your image Robin, I’m a fan of both of you guys, keep up the good work.
Thanks Ahmed for your perspective. I wrote about the topic of what people take away from our posts in my post about twitter – I think it’s something that bloggers don’t think about enough – for a number of reasons – one of them exactly what you said.
As for the think of bigger stuff – I agree totally and that’s why I don’t post about the insider crap that often.
Good post, Allen. As a long-time critic of TechCrunch, I also think it’s worth looking at TechCrunch’s position from a different perspective.
As I write this, these are the latest TechCrunch posts:
Aqua Moto: It’s Like Wave Race For Your iPhone
Social Web Q&A with Google’s Kevin Marks
GumGum Adds B5Media, DailyFill To Its Image-Licensing Network
Microsoft Research: A Look At The Intriguing Social Desktop Prototype
Bebo Zeroes In On Lifestreaming For The Masses; Gets Massive Bump From AIM Profiles
After MySpace And Facebook, Oodle To Power Brand New AOL Classifieds
Kyte Launches Turn-Key iPhone App Platform
Skimlinks Gets $1m To Give Publishers Control Of Affilate Ads
Put This On Your T-Shirt: Spreadshirt Scores €10 Million
More Consolidation In Europe: GoAdv To Acquire LeGuide.com For €50 Million
Letter to Obama: What the Car Industry Needs Is A Steve Jobs
Thummit Scopes Out Twitter To Rate The Oscars In Real Time
Friedman Misses the Point and Economic Reality of Silicon Valley
Hot News: The AP Is Living In The Last Century
How To Make Twitter Sound Like Music To Your Ears
Facebook Photos Pulls Away From The Pack
Another Way To Look At Terms Of Service Agreements: Wordle Visualizations
Andreessen in realtime
Oops: Microsoft Asks Some Laid Off Workers To Send Back Part Of Their Severance
How many of these posts sound really important, let alone remotely interesting?
I wrote about why I’m not reading many tech blogs anymore and I think the headlines above demonstrate very well just how irrelevant TechCrunch has become.
Ironically, that’s exactly what Time observed when it named TechCrunch one of the most overrated blogs of 2009.
The funny thing is that for a blog that always talks about “innovation” and loves to lash out at stodgy old companies, TechCrunch sure seems to act like one. Clearly, nobody at TechCrunch HQ wants to acknowledge that it has a content problem and that it needs to adapt if it’s going to maintain relevance.
Of course, it’s hard to adapt when the trend you rode to the top (in this case Web 2.0) has been exposed as a fraud.
Seems like michael might have switched his name to robin during his break!!
TechCrunch reminds me of the Bush administration. No matter how badly they screw up, they will never admit to ANY wrong doing, EVER. They just go along as if everything was peachy keen, when in fact it’s anything but.
Sorry TC but the writing’s on the wall. Your days as the top tech/startup blog are numbered. And not just because of the topics mentioned here, but also because you stopped covering REAL startups.
Facebook is not a startup. Neither is Twitter. These are both large, established companies with tens or hundreds of millions of users, and they’re 5 and 3 years old respectively. Just because they don’t have a real business model yet, does not mean they’re a startup. A story here and there would be ok, but you write about both of them obsessively every single day. We can only take so much of that before we decide your site has passed its prime.
Great observations as always Allen. You have provided a factual lay out of the events as presented to the world (public) and even though Robin and other TC staffers may disagree – you are showing them how they look to the world.
Yes, possibly Sarah has fans out the wazoo privately, but public comments and reactions are more of the eye rolling and sighing than of the out and out praise for her. Not saying she doesn’t have fans, we all have fans, but again –
You presented how TechCrunch looks to the public right now. You aren’t privy to what Robin is privy too, and neither are we.
Great overall observation post – without the name calling, cursing and back stabbing (front stabbing!) that you see all the time. That is why I enjoy reading quality over quantity. Now some do enjoy post after post after post, and that’s why there are tumblr blogs like mine. :)
Rex
First, Arrington is in Hawaii. Kauai Island to be precise, on the northside of the Island (the evidence is in the photos).
You won’t hear may say this often, but I’m going to stick up for Erick on the RIAA post. Sometimes you get leads from sources and you run them. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t. Risk is inherent when reporting leaks/ sources, and speed is vital in publishing them (well, at TC anyway) to get the jump.
However, given that Gabe accused me of making stories up when I had a lead back in August that didn’t work out, and used that as an excuse to dump The Inquisitr from Techmeme, I call on Gabe to do the same with TechCrunch, that after all would only be fair and equitable, and certainly my post had some basis in truth (and had a legit source) where as Erick’s post would seem far fetched to begin with.
You’re 100% right on the set up to keep the top at the top, although Twitter isn’t the only site guilty, FriendFeed is still making similar recommendations.
Allen,
Your post inspired me to do this toon: http://bit.ly/oVNzf
Guhmshoo