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Comment by prpon | Hacker News Reader

TechCrunch had never been an impartial reporter of startup or tech news. Their coverage of startups even before Mike Arrington started investing is based on how connected the startup is with VCs/angels. The users don't necessarily see all startups in that space covered equally. For TC, it works well since it guarantees access to other news stories before anyone else.

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It's really awful sometimes, and it's unfair to worthy startups that deserve the attention.

Compare the coverage of Quora versus StackExchange, for example. There was a period when there were two Quora articles per day on TC. StackExchange is lucky to be mentioned once every few months, and even then it's usually only brought up as a comparison to "Quora and other Q&A sites".

I am asking an honest question here as I have no idea as to what the answer might be:

What good does it do for a startup to be featured on TC? I suspect it may have to do with getting funding if you are doing a round, but is that it? I would assume that most startups don't derive many paying/staying customers from a TC post, unless the startup itself is narrowly targeted at entrepreneurs/other startups.

Echo chamber benefits ... if people keep hearing your name they're going to start saying it too, some will be investors, some will be users, some will be disheartened competitors who can't get a major update written about while your minor layout tweak got 300 words.

why is there any onus upon techcrunch to be "fair"? the way i see it, arrington has never even pretended to be anything other than a blowhard; he's just a blowhard who has managed to interest a lot of people in what he has to say. you could argue the whole "with great power comes great responsibility" thing, but from what i've seen of most techcrunch-style blog-journalism, it really doesn't work that way.

You're right. That's actually one of the things I admire about TC. When I spoke of fairness, what I meant was my personal perception and preference. He isn't required to be fair by any means, but I require fairness to not get fed up and stop reading. I should have clarified that in my post.

>Compare the coverage of Quora versus StackExchange, for example.

Quora made it to regular press, dailies, TV tech news, etc. but I've not personally seen SE in those media.

True, but it makes me wonder if SE would have the comparable coverage on those media if it got as much push as Quora has.

(I don't think that the two sites should be directly compared, btw -- I was just noting that they had been whenever SE was mentioned.)

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