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TechCrunch scares me.

Posted on 18. Jan, 2009 by Josh in New Media

I haven’t spent too much time sifting through the mountain of tech blog speculation on Steve Jobs’ health, but I did notice this back-and-forth between TechCrunch impresario Michael Arrington and GigaOM founder Om Malik. Arrington started the mini-row with this comment on Malik’s posting of Walt Mossberg’s comments on the Jobs situation:

Walt is seriously undervaluing what Steve brings to the table. It’s fine to have a first class execution team, but it was Steve that made the decision to pull the trigger on the iPod and the iPhone, which seemed crazy at the time. Apple isn’t Apple if he steps down.

Unless you’ve run a company you wouldn’t know this. The problem is that most of these journalists have never run a company.

Responding to Malik’s reasonable response, Arrington added:

Why the big wet kiss to him (Mossberg) anyway?

That’s no way for any adult to behave, let alone towards a well respected competitor. Furthermore, Arrington’s disdain for “these journalists” brings up a problem with TechCrunch that extends to a lot of other sites that are accepted as news sources but don’t play by the rules that we’ve come to expect from the news media.

Although Arrington is the 100th most influential person in the world, TechCrunch can be pretty shady. Arrington has invested in a number of the companies that he covers but, as Joe Lindsey says, “disclosing a conflict of interest…does not mean it’s no longer a conflict of interest.” On a more personal level, I recently had my own run-in with TechCrunch regarding a story about my friends and former clients at Sneakerplay. You can check out the piece and my comment here, but the basic plotline is that Robin Wauters erroneously reported that Sneakerplay was shutting down. When corrected by one of SP’s founders, the author replied, “Sneakerplay says they’re not shutting down, but in fact they are.”

An actual journalist wouldn’t have written the story without contacting Sneakerplay for comment, and definitely would have published a correction. Problem is, bloggers are not journalists. They’re opinion writers under no obligation to attempt an even-handed reporting of facts. As their readership grows at the expense of traditional media, we’re going to miss principle of journalistic objectivity.

Reporters are never without their biases and they sometimes fall prey to the charms of polar bear cubs, but at least we know what standards we’re supposed to hold them to.