This article makes a great point towards the end that I'll repeat here:
There should be another TC-like site reporting on startups now. Specifically there should be a news site about startups that has some critical distance from those startups - at least enough that it doesn't directly financially benefit from my perception of the companies that it's reporting on.
Example, by analogy: I'm interested in news about Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta. But I don't want to read their PR releases. I want someone to do some filtering on that, because there's too much filler there for me to review it daily.
This seems to be a really hard thing to do right! There's a balance in the reporting that it takes a lot of intelligence and finesse to do right, which is why it seems media co's can't do it forever.
One issue is that it can be too adversarial and too clickbait-y. That is a problem.
But the other issue - and this is the problem afflicting the solutions that I've seen - is the opposite. Too far in the pocket of the companies it's reporting on, and friendly to the point of sleepiness, like sitting in on all-hands you're not being paid to attend. A news site that might as well be called "our venture fund and why the companies we invest in are awesome" isn't it.
I don't think there's a site filling this void right now. TC did a decent job at it, for a while, but there should be a new contender.
I like the idea in concept, but feel you'd run into the same problem 'fair' reviewers run into: if you get too negative for a company's liking, or don't say the given talking points, they'll blacklist you. So other sites get the newest scoops, the convention invites, etc.
Why do you think almost every 'top' reviewer on YouTube is so positive on nearly everything? Because the ones who gave fair reviews quit getting early/free access.
There’s no way to do that in mass market form. If you are too balanced you’ll get torn to bits. No one likes that guy. People like to talk about the media but it’s really responding to audience preferences.
For instance, in your case, would you want each article about Google to start with two pages of argumentation on “how terrible their privacy practices are”? Because that’s what the audience wants.
You can have that while the screaming hordes outside yell “paywall?! Paywall?!” But it’s not going to be free like TechCrunch.
Speaking as an MD, as someone who founded a medical technology blog in 2004, and closed it this year.
Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
I truly believe that Google de-ranked most blogs. Used to be they would put a mix of results (some blogs, even small time ones, some forums, some official sites) so that you’d probably get whatever you were looking for on pg1.
Now it’s far more corporate.
I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.
For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.
This may be why things like Substack and Beehiiv have taken off. The only way to combat reposting through Google is to deliver content directly to email inboxes before it gets ranked and reposted.
There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.
Yeah, this exactly. VCs fueled by low interest rates sold the world on free content forever and when the well dried up, all the legacy businesses that wanted to invest in quality and human capital were left holding the bag. It isn't just independent journalism that's suffering. Local journalism and even former stalwarts like Newsweek or Forbes have gone to pot.
You could say that about any tech blog of that era—RRW, Mashable, GigaOm, etc. The point is that tech has thankfully grown up, and they lost it to Bloomberg, NYT, FT, et al.
I'd say NYT and FT have very little coverage of startups and Bloomberg has occasional startups. Techcrunch is still the leader for stories like "Company A has raised $B million to do C" which my friends and I are very interested in when we are interested in C. (e.g. where are you going to find a job doing C? what are the prospects for your own startup idea around C?)
> But in the end, TC is no longer relevant... Here’s the saddest thing: it should be. Startups haven’t gone away. Any media startup could essentially recreate Arrington’s model and start selling little ads while profiling startups. Fun can be had poking holes in Valley blowhards, and there could be reams of content to be had by telling people how to be successful in startup land. But TC won’t do that anymore.
The author seems nostalgic for the good old days, when TechCrunch was a real news outlet that spoke truth to power, and so on. I guess I only ever remember it as a blog that was close enough to Silicon Valley to act as a hype lever, multiplying the force of hype for the latest Silicon Valley horseshit by broadcasting it to the world. The article confirms that was at least part of what they did, but I guess he believes they also did some good things. I wasn't ever a regular reader, and may have that wrong.
I remember noticing years ago (say 2008) that TechCrunch was heavy on stories about Facebook and Google long after either company ceased to be a startup.
I was told back then that this is a function of their readership which is not really interested in startups and is more interested in FAANG or whatever you call it these days.
I post quite a few "Company A has raised $B million to do C" articles to HN and I find that, despite HN being about startups, not a lot of people care if they haven't heard of company A before. It puzzles me a lot because if you are interested in starting a startup or working for a startup or selling things to a startup this is the foundation for your business intelligence.
The average person probably knows Techcrunch from the HBO show since the Disrupt conference was a major plot point. Like you said they were never a bastion of journalism.
They still have a lot of market power. To get placed in them you need to go through a marketer with contacts and that costs quite a bit of money. They publish all this junk stuff but it's just to get more eyeballs. Centralization of this stuff means that these gatekeepers become more valuable. A real pity.
do they really matter anymore? I remember them from the pre 2010 days but even then it seemed to me like linkedin for startups just without the social network thing, i.e. suits posting boring things. These days I can't remember clicking an article linking there ever.
I'd like to continue on the narrative here but the truth is kind of that tech itself hasn't really had much exciting things to report on in the ~2017 to now period. If I were in their shoes I'd probably switch reporting to anti tech as well.
Since then it's been dominated by advancements in generative AI, which mostly appeals the get-rich-quick types that were also into cryptocurrency speculation. At least generative AI does produce _something_ today, at the cost of tremendous amounts of electricity and pushing humans out of office jobs to food preparation and delivery.
After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.
Deeptech is going crazy, all of the AI boom is pretty much an obvious subject if you are in media, and finally you still have your usual gossip. You still have a lot of eyes
> After years of corporate ownership, culminating in Yahoo’s sale to private equity firm Apollo, TC has become a milquetoast site focused on big raises specially placed by expensive PR people and random tech news that has been neutered into pablum. The current editorial structure, controlled by one or two old-guard TCers and a lot of older editors hired by editor Connie Loizos.
sad to realize that this is exactly what i was feeling about TC in the last 3-4 years. is it salvageable?
Legend has it that at one point an irate German entrepreneur spit on Mike at an event, leading us all to have a profound distrust of humanity.
This wasn't a legend. Arrington talked or wrote about it, I can't remember where. Maybe in one of his essays explaining why he was going to Hawaii to take a months-long break. He said he was at a conference and someone came up to him and spit in his face, and then walked away without saying a word. As I recall, he regarded the incident as a turning point that prompted soul-searching about what he was doing.
Traffic was paramount and ad sales were vital, so niche startup posts, posts that everyone once read but were now read by the company, lost their value. Over time, the value of a traditional TC story waned.
Nearly every newsroom has struggled with this for more than 15 years. The only media orgs that have been able to escape or partially escape the black hole of clickbait are by massive scale/subscriber counts (NYT, FT) or those funded by sales at some other profitable branch of the company, such as Bloomberg (terminals).
If there was one thing the article was missing, it was to differentiate the power of something data-driven like Crunchbase versus the articular content of TechCrunch.
I hate seeing Techmeme links because it always guarantees I'll need to click yet another link before getting to the original URL. It's like a useless middleman.
Ah the good old days of Michael Arrington. TC was my gateway drug to silicon valley produced news, including HN.
He had the habits of pulling stunts like showing up at meetings he wasn't invited to. And the ways of a savant lawyer at extracting information from people. I've always suspected he knew well in advance about the iPad; and he convinced investors to back him up to produce an equivalent product, partnering with a laptop company. The product got shipped, only just at 8-10 times the weight of the iPad though.
He'd have made a fantastic COO, or investor relationship manager IMHO if he had not chosen to do TechCrunch. I hope he's doing well at his cryptofund.
> White dude CEOs like Brian Armstrong and Jesse Powell came out hard against DEI efforts and even paid employees to leave, which led, incidentally, to morale at their companies so low it could be measured in millisieverts. But they were making money, baby, so it was all good.
> So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit
Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes while the person being critiqued is an Asian dude. You don't have to think hard about why Asian people might value merit in a system that previously penalized them for their race?
> Haje argued that Wang was a wang.
Comments like this really highlight the hypocrisy and lack of actual principle behind the stances of these people.
Even by Bay Area standards, the last decade and a half has been beyond obscene by the amount and level of douchebags created and their most asinine takes and sins.
As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero.
But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul exits the chat.
Btw, Tech Crunch is and always was almost from the start a cesspool of snakeoil salesmen with zero scruples and a shitty pseudo PR firm. Everybody knew this and "everybody" with VC money played the game.
Also notable that the author didn't link Haje's (the TechCrunch person who railed against Alexander Wang) actual writing because he knew it doesn't make either Haje, or his argument in favor of Haje, look good. So, here it is:
> I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.
This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.
julianeon|1 year ago
There should be another TC-like site reporting on startups now. Specifically there should be a news site about startups that has some critical distance from those startups - at least enough that it doesn't directly financially benefit from my perception of the companies that it's reporting on.
Example, by analogy: I'm interested in news about Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta. But I don't want to read their PR releases. I want someone to do some filtering on that, because there's too much filler there for me to review it daily.
This seems to be a really hard thing to do right! There's a balance in the reporting that it takes a lot of intelligence and finesse to do right, which is why it seems media co's can't do it forever.
One issue is that it can be too adversarial and too clickbait-y. That is a problem.
But the other issue - and this is the problem afflicting the solutions that I've seen - is the opposite. Too far in the pocket of the companies it's reporting on, and friendly to the point of sleepiness, like sitting in on all-hands you're not being paid to attend. A news site that might as well be called "our venture fund and why the companies we invest in are awesome" isn't it.
I don't think there's a site filling this void right now. TC did a decent job at it, for a while, but there should be a new contender.
silisili|1 year ago
Why do you think almost every 'top' reviewer on YouTube is so positive on nearly everything? Because the ones who gave fair reviews quit getting early/free access.
jmole|1 year ago
But the vibe there is more WSJ and less buzzfeed
renewiltord|1 year ago
For instance, in your case, would you want each article about Google to start with two pages of argumentation on “how terrible their privacy practices are”? Because that’s what the audience wants.
You can have that while the screaming hordes outside yell “paywall?! Paywall?!” But it’s not going to be free like TechCrunch.
mudil|1 year ago
Not only TC collapsed but the whole blogosphere collapsed. The independent journalism has collapsed.
When Google and others take your content, crawl your site, store your data, use it and resuse it to serve targeted ads on memes, the journalism becomes a useless pursuit without salary. Google destroyed the internet.
It's a tragedy for whole society.
Scoundreller|1 year ago
Now it’s far more corporate.
I probably shouldn’t have ranked as high as I did on my Joe Blow blog with better directions to my local passport office or phone numbers for my bank (because the bank’s website sucks and does anything but give you their phone number). But I could often make 1st, 2nd or 3rd result until I didn’t. My content was objectively more useful.
For a while, every Google update that people complained about just bumped me higher. Oh well.
wkcheng|1 year ago
There is something additional at play with TechCrunch, though. Recently I feel like they haven't been posting as many articles that are about smaller startups as they used to. They tend to post more about Google, Nvidia, Intel, etc. I find myself reading it less and less because it's mostly news that you can also find elsewhere.
encom|1 year ago
And hopefully with it, the word "blogosphere".
tootie|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
marban|1 year ago
PaulHoule|1 year ago
karaterobot|1 year ago
The author seems nostalgic for the good old days, when TechCrunch was a real news outlet that spoke truth to power, and so on. I guess I only ever remember it as a blog that was close enough to Silicon Valley to act as a hype lever, multiplying the force of hype for the latest Silicon Valley horseshit by broadcasting it to the world. The article confirms that was at least part of what they did, but I guess he believes they also did some good things. I wasn't ever a regular reader, and may have that wrong.
PaulHoule|1 year ago
I was told back then that this is a function of their readership which is not really interested in startups and is more interested in FAANG or whatever you call it these days.
I post quite a few "Company A has raised $B million to do C" articles to HN and I find that, despite HN being about startups, not a lot of people care if they haven't heard of company A before. It puzzles me a lot because if you are interested in starting a startup or working for a startup or selling things to a startup this is the foundation for your business intelligence.
throwup238|1 year ago
savanaly|1 year ago
renewiltord|1 year ago
karolist|1 year ago
nuz|1 year ago
forgetfulness|1 year ago
After all this proletarization of knowledge workers is normalized, hopefully the new AI Robber Barons will leave us some sick public libraries or some equivalent, at least.
snats|1 year ago
swyx|1 year ago
> After years of corporate ownership, culminating in Yahoo’s sale to private equity firm Apollo, TC has become a milquetoast site focused on big raises specially placed by expensive PR people and random tech news that has been neutered into pablum. The current editorial structure, controlled by one or two old-guard TCers and a lot of older editors hired by editor Connie Loizos.
sad to realize that this is exactly what i was feeling about TC in the last 3-4 years. is it salvageable?
oaththrowaway|1 year ago
jdbiggs|1 year ago
ilamont|1 year ago
This wasn't a legend. Arrington talked or wrote about it, I can't remember where. Maybe in one of his essays explaining why he was going to Hawaii to take a months-long break. He said he was at a conference and someone came up to him and spit in his face, and then walked away without saying a word. As I recall, he regarded the incident as a turning point that prompted soul-searching about what he was doing.
Traffic was paramount and ad sales were vital, so niche startup posts, posts that everyone once read but were now read by the company, lost their value. Over time, the value of a traditional TC story waned.
Nearly every newsroom has struggled with this for more than 15 years. The only media orgs that have been able to escape or partially escape the black hole of clickbait are by massive scale/subscriber counts (NYT, FT) or those funded by sales at some other profitable branch of the company, such as Bloomberg (terminals).
PeterCorless|1 year ago
jrhizor|1 year ago
znq|1 year ago
wallflower|1 year ago
https://techmeme.com/
cddotdotslash|1 year ago
marban|1 year ago
BenoitP|1 year ago
He had the habits of pulling stunts like showing up at meetings he wasn't invited to. And the ways of a savant lawyer at extracting information from people. I've always suspected he knew well in advance about the iPad; and he convinced investors to back him up to produce an equivalent product, partnering with a laptop company. The product got shipped, only just at 8-10 times the weight of the iPad though.
He'd have made a fantastic COO, or investor relationship manager IMHO if he had not chosen to do TechCrunch. I hope he's doing well at his cryptofund.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
TruthWillHurt|1 year ago
strgtwhtmle|1 year ago
[deleted]
brigadier132|1 year ago
> So, by all measures, Alexandr Wang’s MEI bullshit was just that, bullshit
Amazing, I don't think he gets it. His rant about white dudes while the person being critiqued is an Asian dude. You don't have to think hard about why Asian people might value merit in a system that previously penalized them for their race?
> Haje argued that Wang was a wang.
Comments like this really highlight the hypocrisy and lack of actual principle behind the stances of these people.
unsupp0rted|1 year ago
In his world because it's "white" it's punching-up/innocuous.
PedroBatista|1 year ago
As time passes like in everything we tend to forget the bad things and imagine the past with rose colored glasses when the borrowing rates were essentially zero.
But then you interact with one of "those key people" from that era, and dear Lord.. your soul exits the chat.
Btw, Tech Crunch is and always was almost from the start a cesspool of snakeoil salesmen with zero scruples and a shitty pseudo PR firm. Everybody knew this and "everybody" with VC money played the game.
brandur|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240628212036/https://techcrunc...
The Pulitzer Prize-worthy content in question:
> I would invite him — and those supporting them — to fuck all the way off. You misunderstand me. You thought I wanted you to fuck only partially the way off. Please, read my lips. I was perfectly clear: Off you fuck. All the way. Remove head from ignorant ass, then fuck all the way off.
This is the quality of writing whose loss the author is arguing is why TechCrunch has lost its global relevance. A perfect inversion of the truth if I've ever seen one.
decremental|1 year ago
[deleted]
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
oldpersonintx|1 year ago
[deleted]