With the exit of Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, TechCrunch has lost its two most recognizable voices, and also, perhaps, its gonzo spirit.
TechCrunch is growing up. Or growing old.
An year after being acquired by AOL, two of its most prominent voices, founder Michael Arrington and MG Siegler are heading to Crunchfund, the new VC firm floated by Arrington, while another, Paul Carr, is working on his own startup. The internal strife and drama has been well documented (perhaps too well documented) to recount here. And while the site continues to be a page-view munching monster, long time readers know that something’s amiss. Sure, there’s the breaking news, the regular columns, Alexia Tsotsis’ quirkiness and Erick Schonfeld’s insightful analysis, but something just doesn’t feel right.
Could it be the exit of Paul Carr, who brought a much needed dose of sardonic wistfulness to what can often be a drab subject (funding rounds don’t really make for fun weekend reading)? Perhaps it’s MG’s absence, that chest thumping Apple champion who could always be counted on to divide opinion. Or maybe it’s the missing founder himself, Michael Arrington, whose legendary arrogance is exactly what endeared him to so many (including me)?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. While the loss of three influential writers can handicap any publication, TechCrunch’s current state (healthy though it may be) speaks of a much deeper malaise plaguing new media: the malaise of respectability.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but around a couple of years ago, blogging (and bloggers) became big business. After years of chiding NYT and mainstream tech media for its slowness and stifling editorial control (aka, the creativity gas chamber), TechCrunch itself went mainstream. MG was on TV. Arrington was being interviewed by mainstream media outlets. Paul Carr was dropping quotes faster than expletives in his NSFW column. This wasn’t exactly the coterie of underground bloggers dishing the inside shit on tech startups anymore; it was a multi million dollar business.
And as with all underground ‘movements’ (as loosely as that term may be used), TechCrunch, and indeed, others of its ilk, too became a little buttoned up, a little too concerned, perhaps, with reputations and respectability. The t-shirts and pajamas were out, the khakis were in. The gonzo spirit that powered sites like TechCrunch, Mashable, etc. was drying up, replaced by a single minded focus on reaching monthly page-view goals. In other words: they stopped being pirates.
Journalistic Delusions
As the old and new media converged, the dividing line between ‘blogger’ and ‘journalist’ became a little blurred. If NYT breaks tech news through a blog, do its writers remain journalists, or are they bloggers now?
A similar conundrum has affected bloggers, who are increasingly beginning to see themselves as journalists. Arrington was forced to resign because his private interests affected the ‘journalistic integrity’ of TechCrunch. What everyone forgets, though, is that TechCrunch was never a journalistic property to begin with. It was – and still is – a blog. And as Arrington himself would put it: it’s my blog and I’ll damn well write whatever I want to write on it.
Central to that line of thought is the delusion of objectivity itself. Hunter S. Thompson derided this delusion, claiming that outside of stock market reports and sports results, ‘objective journalism’ will remain a misnomer.
Bloggers in 2006 understood that. Or perhaps they were too naïve to realize it. But they were, unmistakably, united and guided by Thompson’s gonzo spirit. These guys were making mockeries of established media practices like embargos. Fact checking was laid to the wayside; if it was rumored, it would be published. And that was refreshing. That pulled in guys like me into this world, a world where blogging still wasn’t respectable. It was just a nerdier version of swinging from the mast of a pirate ship, cutlass in hand. You sure as hell didn’t care about objectivity; it was all opinion.
Now, of course, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others of this ilk regularly pummel NYT, CNET, etc. at breaking news and gathering massive page views. It didn’t happen overnight; it was a slow, gradual metamorphosis not unaccompanied by the corporatization of new media. Along the way, bloggers also realized a cold hard truth: revenue on the internet is tied to pageviews. Pageviews are tied to breaking news and exclusives. Breaking news and exclusives are tied to cultivating relationships with insiders. And cultivating relationships is always tied to not pissing anybody off.
Call it a survival tactic, a gradual calcification of the gonzo instinct, or an attempt at respectability, but that cutlass and the eye-patch are now long gone.
And it has taken the spirit of new media – and TechCrunch – with it.
