Tech, Crunched: How the go-to site for startup news lost its way

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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).

https://techmeme.com/

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.

> 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.