DISQUS

I don't think there's any need for TechCrunch / Schonfeld to fall on their swords over this particular story, but one issue it raises is the persistently poor or non-existent quality of their "sources". Remember the "we have it on great authority that x, y or z are buying Digg" stories? Or the third-hand reports about what was going on at Yahoo / MSFT?

The truth is that they simply don't do any real research for most of their stories, don't appear to have any really credible sources, and use the real-time nature of the way they're published as a crutch on which to support a whole lot of ill-informed conjecture. I understand and support the argument that many blogs have done great things with regard to the responsiveness and dynamism in the creation of news stories, but I just don't think TechCrunch is doing this any more.

It's rather sad, too, that Michael Arrington's response to any kind of criticism is to lump everyone together as trolls and stalkers who have a grudge to bear, when many are simply trying to add to a real discussion.

I actually prefer it when Arrington cheerfully treats TC as a bully pulpit to say exactly what he thinks; I stop reading when that gets obscured with the attempts by his other writers to cobble together 20 non-stories a day.

To *some* extent the structure and the journalism are inseparable. I say *some* because like virtually every other late-stage industry there's a lot of bloat and self-preserving flab in there alongside the very necessary things that allow journalists to research and write stories. Investigative journalism takes time, patience, intelligence, and hard graft that can't reliably be accomplished by unpaid or barely paid amateurs. And on the flip side, many journalists I'm sure burn through large expense accounts without producing anything that can really be construed as news.

But it's the triumphant anti-intellectualism that I find most disturbing in some parts of this debate. As if, somehow, institutions like the NYT exist to belittle everyone else with long words and longer lunches. It's all a bit like Sarah Palin screaming that the media are elitist snobs because they want her to answer tough questions. Or, closer to home, like Harper's government's hatred and fear of anything that is even peripherally connected to the word "culture".

I'm very much with Nick Carr, that the conditions we see today are the beginnings of the market correcting conditions of over-supply. Part of that is also about accepting that institutions like the NYT and the Economist weren't foisted upon us poor yokels by cruel lords of the manor, but rather grew on the basis of a market that, in its own flawed way, values quality. In turn that means that those sounding alarm bells about the dangers of the "ignorant amateurs" taking over generally shouldn't be heeded, since the market isn't completely hopeless at allowing quality to win through.

All of which is a long way of saying what I've said before: that the truth is somewhere in the middle, between newspapers and traditional journalism being all bad and all good!

All great points, but with all due respect to our friends in the US, Canada and the UK don't have the same issue with a fundamentalist voting block. One of the things we find so difficult in Canada (urban Canada at least), and in the UK where I'm from originally, is the notion that there is even a small number of people who believe in the symbiotic virtues of creationism and automatic weapons, let alone a large and rabidly vocal minority.

In any of these "now vs. the Golden Age" debates it's always interesting to dissect the reality behind the nostalgia. The prevailing wisdom among Blatchford's set seems to be that the fragmentation of news ultimately means we know less, particularly about things that are actually important, but I just don't buy that.

For example, the average teenager has ALWAYS known or cared very little about domestic politics, world affairs, economics, and so on. The difference now is that this information, though it may be surrounded by a lot of mindless drivel about gossip and celebrities, is actually accessible.

Blogs give a voice to idiots, but their proliferation means that it's virtually impossible for any piece of fact-based news to escape being reported upon.

I suspect the reality of the "curmudgeon" ("curmudgeoness"?) persona has more to do with the radical shift in the economics of producing and monetizing content. That is to say, it has more to do with initiative and focus than being within the safe walls of the establishment.

And I'm still trying to figure out which companies are now about to begin the kind of growth trajectory Apple and Google showed between 2003 and 2008...

Regardless of this tweak, are you seeing any evidence of Twitter shifting into the mainstream? I still barely know a single person outside of the tech community who has heard of Twitter, and those who have simply think it's a mostly useless toy.

The tough thing is Twitter is completely useless when you first get started (no followers and it's hard to know who to follow) and quickly becomes useless again when you're following lots of people. I don't think this latest change will do anything to make it really useful for normal people.

Probably beating a dead horse here, but I think it is important to draw out that point about traffic.

If you're relying on remnant inventory through ad networks, then you could argue that traffic is all that matters. But if you want to get serious about selling your own advertising at much higher rates, then it's far better to capture a really strong audience that's there because they buy in to the content, not because they like watching the train wreck.

So in the long run I think TechCrunch is sacrificing credibility AND revenue on the altar of low quality page views.

Also a fair point, and the last thing I want to see is blogs turning into Business Week 2.0. But the human qualities I respond to are intelligence, strength of character, tolerance, empathy and generosity. These are pretty much the opposite of the personas that are in vogue on the tech blogs. Telling someone to f**k off on Twitter and then publicly saying that it can be excused because of extreme drunkenness? It's like kids in high school boasting about how wasted they got at the party where they sat in a corner with a bottle of peach schnapps they stole from mom's liquor cabinet.

It really doesn't matter, except that these kinds of incredibly childish faux feuds push the audience for TechCrunch and Wired even further down market. If you drive huge numbers of monthly page views from the kind of audience that simply likes to troll about and attack each other in the comments, you'll end up with a large site that's vastly underperforming its revenue potential because it's not an audience that's receptive to or wanted by advertisers. That seems so different from Arrington's apparent goal of creating a credible business / technology news outlet that can compete with and displace the incumbents.

The irony for me is that the apparent conflicts Wired cites are pretty much a non-issue. There probably aren't going to be hyper-critical posts about DanceJam on TechCrunch, but it's not like he's on the board at Google and letting that shape his analysis of the Yahoo! / Microsoft debacle. The real issue is that TechCrunch seems to default to the low / easy road instead of stepping up and embracing its opportunity to make Wired and even more mainstream business publications irrelevant. That this debate has descended into a "he started it / she started it" pissing match that appeals only to a tiny minority of TC's potential audience makes it still more embarrassing.

I'd be interested in your take on the economics of both AWS and Google's offering. Someone whose opinion and knowledge I trust told me earlier this year that AWS was considered internally to be a nightmare, contributing a tiny fraction of Amazon's revenue yet representing a disproportionately large proportion of the company's infrastructure costs.

One thing I've learned from various start-up experiences (some moderately successful, some so-so, some outright failures, others just too early to know) is that the people who *talk* (or, I suppose, blog) about how hard they're working, their insane hours, etc, are usually among the least productive.

Even the successful blogs seem to validate this truth, in that volume always seems to trump quality. That is, the focus is on generating as many posts as possible to chase pageview growth that I'm sure is accompanied by bottom-feeding and even declining CPM rates. It's much easier in the short term to assume the position of sweatshop 2.0 rather than be innovative and work out how to create a property that will attract a sustained, high-value audience and drive up those CPMs.

It's interesting that all of the examples cited are technology-related blogs, which perhaps does nothing more than reveal that the tech/geek audience simply isn't attractive to the mainstream advertisers who spend 90% of the ad dollars. Combine low barriers to entry with a product the market doesn't value very highly and a sweatshop is all-but inevitable.

As Markus indicates, it's hard to see how his revenue could be any less with that number of page views and the plethora of ads on the site. There have been other cheap shots speculating that he's spending all the money on google ads to drive traffic, but try searching for any online dating term and I don't think you'll see any PoF ads.

In fact that might be the most interesting story of all -- the practically free cost of customer acquisition (at least if you don't count the piece of the pie Google and the ad networks take, which the publisher never sees anyway). Didn't Match.com spend almost $175 million on ads last year (more than half of their 2006 revenue)?