CNET takes a friendly jab at me today, making fun of the fact that I had a typo in a middle-of-the-night post on BitTorrent.
That’s ok, I can take a jab from them. While CNET writers were all cozy in bed last night, Om and I were competing to break the Bittorent story. That’s why blogs will win, and CNET will lose.
Benchmark Capital partner Michael Eisenberg wrote a thoughtful post on the nature of blogs and conflicts of interest this morning. He specifically talks about a lot of the issues we’ve discussed recently about TechCrunch:
Techcrunch is not journalism (as if that is objective and conflict free:)). Techcrunch and other blogs like it is insider announcements, opinion and analysis. In fact, I would suggest that Michael Arrington and Techcrunch are closer in genre to Jupiter, Gartner and Oreilly than he is to the NYT or Sydney Herald. And, I would suggest that Arrington is more above board than any of those companies.
As anyone who has been in the enterprise software business will tell you, many of these research houses are implicitly pay to play. When you subscribe to their services and get their analysts’ time then he knows enough about you to put you in the quadrant or report . There are more conflicts of interest at the market research houses than at TechCrunch and they are rarely disclosed.
We had some staff changes at TechCrunch today. Marshall Kirkpatrick’s last day with TechCrunch was yesterday. He’s been with us for six hectic months, and has written a ton of brilliant content that has moved the blog forward significantly. I wish him well in his new endeavors, which you can read about on his personal blog. Marshall says he’s proud of his time at TechCrunch. All I can say in return is that it was an honor to work with him, and I hope he can find the time to come back and write an occasional editorial post for old time’s sake.
A new editor, Natali Del Conte, joins us today. Natali was most recently a reporter for PC Magazine, and a regular on John Dvorak’s Cranky Geeks show. Natali’s first couple of posts are up on TechCrunch already.
I’m not even a woman and I’m offended by CNET’s Top Ten Girl Geeks article, which includes such notable technologists at Paris Hilton, Daryl Hannah and Lisa Simpson (yes, the cartoon character).
Someone actually wrote this post, and then at least one other person edited it. This went through multiple people to be published. Did anyone, at any point, think?
Nice one, CNET. Way to be a leader in our industry.
Daniela Barbosa from Factiva got her hands on the print plate for the Wall Street Journal article about TechCrunch a couple of weeks ago, and she says she’ll send it to me. Awesome! And the video is very cool.
Dave Winer says “Hanging out here with Doc Searls for a couple of days last week was like what I’m looking for, but I want ten Docs, and I want to be around them 200 days a year, developing ideas across disciplines. This is what my soul yearns for, not fame, or wealth, more like fullfillment.”
I “see” Doc every week on the Gillmor Gang and love the guy, but that’s just creepy. 
And of course Dave is already famous and wealthy, so it’s easy to say he isn’t looking for those things.
But I know what Dave is saying. Great late-night conversation with intelligent people is a lot more interesting that the hallway chatter at the latest conference. I’m completely burned out on those 2 minute “how ya doin” talks myself, and I’m taking two months off from the valley to get my bearings again. I’ll be staying at my parents retirement home on a small island in Washington state and working half time. The other half of my time will be spent with my parents, and skiing at nearby Mt. Baker. Yeah, I’ll miss all the holiday parties in Silicon Valley this year, but frankly that’s a plus, too.
Submit a company for review that starts off with:
“_____.com Leads Web 2.0 Revolution with New Unrivalled Revenue-Sharing Social Networking Site
– In one of the most monumental projects ever created for the Internet, _____.com has launched a never-before-seen user-powered news site, positioning the company to achieve success of MySpace and YouTube proportions.”
This is the way to manipulate bloggers to create a kick ass product launch. All of this was coordinated without the help of any PR professional, although Riya CEO Munjal Shah is better than most CEOs at herding us cats:
Then the links start flowing in.
All of this was coordinated to launch at exactly midnight, just as the site went live.
Lots going on at Widgets Live today.
If you aren’t there but want to follow the news, Liz Gannes at GigaOm is live blogging the event.
Looks like they’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic again.
If I were to write a long post on why this isn’t going to work, it would include these quotes:
“no one’s going to lose their job because of this.”
“We’ve broken into task forces to figure out how to implement this, but some of this stuff, I’ll be honest, gives us great pause” (emphasis added)
“some people expect that whatever’s on our site undergoes the same degree of scrutiny as what appears in the paper”
The MothersClick mess is slowly sorting itself out. The founder emailed today and apologized. I apologized back.
Tonight I came across a post by their PR firm that is infinitely interesting to me (via DJI, a really excellent blog).
What this comes down to is this – I didn’t write about MothersClick because I don’t remember being pitched by them or their firm. Maybe it was a hellish day and I missed the email or call. Maybe I or Marshall looked at it an passed for some reason. I really just don’t remember, and a recent email purge has wiped out any history on my end.
I did write about Maya’s Mom, a competitor. I already know the founder and had written about them before. Updates are always easier than new reviews. Plus Maya’s Mom raised an angel round from a very well known group of individuals, which is news itself. So I made a recent post about Maya’s Mom in complete innocence, not even thinking about the storm that would result. Trust me, if I had known, I would have just not written about them. The fallout has all come this week, while I was on vacation, and today I flew home early to be able to deal with the media attention this has gotten. Not the way I wanted to spend my time away.
But the PR Firm post has really made me think. I don’t want companies to spend cycles with PR firms talking about strategies for getting in front of us, and how to deal with not getting a post on TC. I also don’t want entrepreneurs to be afraid to take a shot at me, or for PR firms to be giving clients advice on how to “stay on my good side”. We’re all human, and I’m used to taking shots. Plus, controversy is interesting. When the founder of MothersClick emailed and apologized, I assumed she did that because she felt that it was the right thing to do. My apology back was certainly heartfelt. I don’t want to have to wonder if that apology was drafted by her PR firm and sent to me as a business decision (and I’m assuming that isn’t the case).
Putting journalists up on a pedestal is very old media. Everything about TechCrunch, and most blogs, is about access. Comments are open, for better or worse. My email is on the about page. We have a company submission form. We even hired an analyst who’s primary job is to go through submissions and make sure we don’t miss good companies.
But clearly that’s broken, as evidenced by this encounter. MothersClick is a perfectly good startup that we would normally cover. Lots of other people did, if that means anything. But we missed it, and I’m pretty sure we miss a lot of others, too.
I don’t know what the right answer is to fix this, but it’s something I’m thinking about.
And I’m sorry if I sound like a 13 year old girl writing in her diary. Maybe I do. But I am just as new to all of this as everyone else, and I stay up at nights thinking about how to do the right thing.
The WSJ has an article on TechCrunch today (print on Friday). I was interviewed for this, but they also spoke to a lot of other people as well. Much of the information they included wasn’t from me. There continues to be a fascination around the economics of our business and the conflicts/disclosure issue (this article was written before the discussion yesterday and in the post immediately below this one). To be clear, yes I understand that I am going to take a beating in the blogosphere for this article. I’m glad to see they also mentioned Om Malik and Matt Marshall – two bloggers I respect greatly and consider mentors.
The last two weeks has brough a fresh wave of TechCrunch hate. I’ve learned to avoid responding to this stuff in the past because it just draws more attention to it, but tonight a reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald named Asher Moses emailed me and said “First off, great site – i’m a regular reader of yours.” He then went on to say he’s working on a story about the “disclosure scrubbed at techcrunch debacle.”
I took issue with his use of the term “debacle” before actually speaking to me – this tells me everything I need to know about this particular reporter’s slant on this “story,” and basically told him to fuck off. And while I’m not surprised that someone is looking to do a hit job on TechCrunch, I am surprised that traditional media is starting to see TechCrunch as newsworthy enough to attack. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
I’ll go through the details around this below, but I want to make one thing very clear about how TechCrunch operates. It seems that I have to make a statement like this every couple of months.
TechCrunch and Conflicts of Interest
TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don’t fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren’t, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. Yes, I’m grouping them unfairly, but the really good reporters will all soon be on their own anyway, so this will be completely true eventually.
TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be.
All I promise is to give my honest opinion every time I write, regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest or not.
Just like other publications like the New York Times, we take advertising on this site. And sometimes, just like the NYT, we write about companies that may have advertised here. Sales and editorial are now completely separate – Jennifer Rice handles any money coming into the company and I have nothing to say about it, other than a veto if I don’t like the service (I vetoed a payperpost advertising campaign recently, for example). Other than that, there is a complete ethical wall. Likewise for our events – sales are handled by Jeanne Logozzo.
When it comes to my personal investments, they are all stated on the About Page at TechCrunch, and we disclose conflicts in posts. It’s easy to note a conflict when writing about a company I’ve invested in. It’s harder when writing about a competitor because sometimes it isn’t clear if a company is a competitor or not. We try to be overly inclusive, but the About Page disclosure is always there as well.
Traditional media doesn’t like this. They hate the fact that I get information that they can’t get. They hate the fact that I actually enjoy my job and have fun doing it. And because they wield a powerful weapon, their publications, they are going to continue to use that weapon to try to destroy TechCrunch and blogs like it.
I don’t know what else to say – none of this is going to change. Some people seem to think that I either need to shut down TechCrunch, or stop investing. Here’s my answer: No.
The Most Recent Issue
A lot of startups fire off a press release to our email and expect to be covered. That of course doesn’t happen – many great, funded companies don’t get covered on TechCrunch. We decide what to cover based on personal interest and what we think will get page views. Just because your company has a nice design, or raised a boatoad of cash, doesn’t mean you’ll be written about. If we wrote about every company, no one would come to the site. We make choices, and we are judged by our readers.
A few startups that don’t get coverage go ballistic. They leave random irate anonymous comments on the blog (sometimes using the same IP address as previous, non-anonymous comments). They talk about how much of an asshole I am at parties. Etc. For this reason, I have stopped going to parties.
A company called Mothersclick was angry that I covered a competitor called Maya’s Mom. I know the founders of Maya’s Mom from a number of years ago, and in our initial coverage of the company disclosed that relationship. Later, thinking about the fact that I’m not really that close to that person, I removed the disclosure. I do that all the time. At the end of the day, most of my friends are entrepreneurs, and I don’t disclose every friendship when I write.
I guess Mothersclick sent an email or press release or something to us, and was upset when we didn’t respond. I have no idea. But they left a nasty comment in the post above suggesting that the reason we didn’t cover them was because of the “friendship conflict”. They complained to valleywag, who immediately wrote a story about it. The story got up on Digg, where another person from Mothersclick wrote:
Actually, I was involved in a startup competitor to Maya’s Mom and we tried to get prelaunch press from Arrington months ago (around the same time as he first announced Maya’s Mom) but he wouldn’t give us the time of day. Now that our site launched (about 2 weeks ago), Arrington has still ignored us, despite press releases and direct contact…and now he’s pimping Maya’s Mom…which is owned by a former colleague and friend of his.
Fuck Arrington’s biased ass. He as no credibility anymore.
Nice.
But the truth is I’ve never heard of Mothersclick other than when they were attacking me. Hell, I often forget all about startups we’ve actually written about (see the list here and you’ll understand why). I am trying to build a new type of publishing company, one based on insider information, and frankly I don’t have a lot of time to conspire to keep the most recent parenting site off the public radar becausee I worked in the same office as someone back in the 90′s.
My record is clean. I call things like I see them. I disclose financial conflicts. I’ve complimented direct competitors to a startup I founded (see here and here), edgeio. I’ve slammed sponsors (see my comments on ReviewMe). There’s a very good chance I am going to rip apart a startup I invested in when it launches soon if they don’t get their shit together.
If you are a casual reader looking for things to attack, you’ll find them. But if you are a regular reader, you’ll know that I’m a straight shooter, I love startups and I always write what I actually believe. That’s a lot more than most traditional journalists can say, and I’m proud to be a blogger.
