Normally, TechCrunch breaks stories but today it would seem that Mike Arrington's budding technology news empire is the story. A Crunchnote from Arrington posted earlier today says:
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 Syndey 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.
With regards to the actual details of the angle the Herald has on their (yet-to-be published) story—that Arrington ignores news about startups who compete with companies he and his friends have an interest in—I have nothing to offer than my observation that TechCrunch seems to do right by their readers with disclosure. In other words, I won't quibble when Arrington says:
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.
Still, this is an interesting situation, and Mike, in this post at least, isn't giving the debate its due. He's setting this up as the latest skirmish in an MSM vs Bloggers civil war, a position that both aggrandizes the Herald article (when it's really a non-story) and downplays the more serious and larger issue of how a financial insider can play the news game.
TechCrunch is a media company. A news outlet. A tipsheet. Perhaps a combination of all three. It also happens to be produced in part by a person who's an active investor in the industry, and while he clearly discloses his interest in companies when he writes about them, he doesn't necessarily talk about his investments when the subject is the competition. That's not a conflict for the Wall Street Journal (and, I assume, the Sydney Morning Herald), but a new one that a company like TechCrunch creates. That's one of the main points of a rather long Nick Carr post on ethics, blogging, and TechCrunch from earlier this month. And much as it pains me to agree with Nick Carr, I find myself doing so at his conclusion:
When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility. In this area, as in others, blogs have far more to learn from newspapers than newspapers have to learn from blogs.
Which is the point that journobloggers Matt Ingram and Heather Green make: There's a real debate here about how newly-powerful chroniclers of the blogging age should best serve their readers, but it's not at all aided by a false Revolutionaries vs Dinosaurs argument. Traditional journalists have personal relationships, political considerations, and financial relationships, too. They've developed standards and conventions that help them deal with these issues, and bloggers would be foolish to ignore them.
Tags: TechCrunch, Arrington, conflict of interest, transparency, journalism, ethics