You see, Journalism has advanced to a huge extent in the online world. In the real world, a journalist would have to travel places, arrange interviews, and so forth. It's much much hardwork than 'online journalism'. Organizations like TechCrunch and Gizmodo are basically thieves. They don't have to travel anywhere to get the news, they just 'steal' it from goodwill communities like Hackernews and Reddit and make the titles misleading or 'attractive' so they can get more clicks and add bias to it, insert ads wherever possible, and write articles favoring companies that sponsor them. I can list you so many articles that Gizmodo spins up from Hackernews. Less than 10% of their blogposts are fair and original. The rest are just rip-off from non-profit communities like HN. That is just plain wrong.
TechCrunch has never been afraid of admitting being sponsored by companies, infact, Matt has once admitted that he was sponsored by Apple to write a post favoring their technology over a competitors' based on meaningless grounds.
And Gizmodo, needless to say, are pro-apple, no matter what. What is so bad about these organizations are that they are unfair. They are deceiving people. They spend initially huge amounts of time and effort to build this trust with their audience and they just misuse it by writing unfair articles in favor of companies sponsoring them later. They are killing fair journalism. That is just plain wrong.
These organizations are just a shame to Journalism itself. As a journalist, your duty is to report the news as it is, not what you think of the news. No one gives a fuck to what you think of the news. We all have our own opinions, right? Especially infront of a huge audience, there is a moral obligation to be honest, unbiased. You will never find such ethics with TechCrunch or Gizmodo. For example, recently on Gizmodo, you will find pro-Apple articles suggesting comparisons between every single device on this planet concluding Apple is superior in all aspects, but, never any of its disadvantages. iOS was hacked recently (Security hole). When was the last time you read that on TechCrunch or Gizmodo? You didn't, because they didn't write it. Why didn' they write it?
That is why I am not a fan of MG Seigler or Jesus Diaz or anyone else from these shady organizations. They are just a shame to the Journalism community and they share our knowledge and profit out of it by wrong means. They think they are intelligent, but an average HN reader has more knowledge about tech than these biased, paid writers.
I hope TC falls off soon.