2009 March, 11th

Mihaela Lica

Not long ago, TechCrunch founder and web celebrity Michael Arrington wrote:

Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face.

The identity of the “someone” was not revealed; maybe the author didn’t know that “someone”. Maybe the “someone” didn’t understand Arrington’s concept of “integrity” – and as far as I am concerned I am in the dark too. Read on, my motives will become clear by the end of this “opinion” piece.

Arrington assumed that the person who deliberately spat on him was a startup owner, unhappy for not receiving news coverage at TechCrunch. Arrington obviously believes that TechCrunch is the alpha and omega of everything startup, and probably assumes that if TechCrunch doesn’t cover the news, no one will. I don’t want to even start commenting about how TechCrunch selects the startups it writes about – the number of “news” without disclosure of partnership at TechCrunch is increasing. Partnership?

Yes – partnerships are not always financial. It’s enough to support a certain someone who spent some time in your house to the detriment of other companies for example. So I am not saying that press coverage at TechCrunch is being bought with money – maybe someone is just calling in favors. Even so, I am not saying that Arrington shouldn’t do favors for his buddies. After all, what are friends for? But, what about the “fair chances for all” concept?

This time I will not criticize the way TechCrunch pushes some companies and never even mentions others that are obviously more innovative. TechCrunch is a privately held company blog, and all “privately held” publications have the right to publish whatever they want on their estates. If that’s the case, Arrington, please spare us the following discourse:

Startups that don’t get the coverage they want and competing journalists and bloggers tend to accuse us of the most ridiculous things. It hasn’t been worth our time to respond to these accusations; I always assumed that our work and integrity would speak for itself. But as we’ve grown and become more successful the attacks have also grown. On any given day, when I care to look, dozens of highly negative comments are made about me, TechCrunch or one of our employees in our comments, on Twitter, or on blogs or other sites. Some of these are appropriately critical comments on things we can be doing better. But the majority of comments are among the more horrible things I can imagine a human being say.”

Don’t get me wrong, I almost sympathized with poor Arrington who got spat on with no apparent reason, while attending a conference in Germany. Sure I don’t agree with this way of combating opponents, it’s low and graceless for the one who uses such “tactics.” Even so, I don’t think that the “spitter” was an unhappy startup owner. Not after I read the following story: MeeVee A Ghost Town, All Employees “Inactive.” LiveUniverse CEO Greenspan Still Nuts. – I’ll get back to this in a minute.

When Arrington wrote Meet Lois Whitman, The Poster Child For Everything Wrong With PR I actually admired the guy. I said to myself: look a person who is not afraid to call out a bad PR practice, when he sees one. To my surprise, the same man who speaks about “integrity” is not afraid of using one of his employees to publish defamatory information about a web personality who is constantly ridiculed and defamed everywhere else – Brad Greenspan.

MeeVee A Ghost Town, All Employees “Inactive.” LiveUniverse CEO Greenspan Still Nuts. reminds me a lot of a ValleyWag article:

The first part of the article is a perfect fit for TechCrunch – information the public needs about MeeVee and LiveUniverse.

The second part though, makes me wonder: why would Arrington forward a private email, addressed to him, to Erick Schonfeld? Obviously, Arrington has a personal issue with Greenspan and he is afraid to say so, or else, why would he ask (or allow) an employee to denigrate the CEO of a company TechCrunch is ready to bury without second thoughts?

Greenspan’s mistake: to send pictures of his girlfriend (naked) to the CEO of TechCrunch probably over-familiarity and a strange idea of “being friendly.”

The horde of TechCrunch fan boys jubilates: another nail in Greenspan’s coffin. The faithful readers want to see the complete pictures, not just a headshot of the beautiful playmate that Greenspan prides to befriend. The blog entry in case becomes a wall where every nobody can come to write derogatory affirmations about Greenspan, such as “Not only is he sniffing cocaine on a daily basis, he is also illegally obtaining prescriptions for other drugs.”

But Arrington never even had the backbone to write the post about Greenspan’s mistake himself. He had to ask an employee to do it, employee who uses licenses such as “Ever dutiful to our readers, we post a headshot of one of the photos Greenspan sent us.” Dutiful to the readers, huh? Well, in that case, Mr. Schonfeld, let me tell you that the last thing I want to read at TechCrunch is about Greenspan’s naked girlfriend. On the other hand, you make use of an inappropriate pronoun here: there was no “us” – Greenspan sent those messages to Arrington – personally. What about some proper disclosure, if anything?

To make a long story short, Michael Arrington, if you are transforming TechCrunch into a playfield for your personal attacks to some of your enemies, please spare us the “integrity” discourse and never, ever whine about who spat in your face. You are not supposed to defame people on a highly trusted tech blog we all grew to admire. Personally I am disappointed, and I know it is pointless to ask for your response. However, you should know that if you don’t like people calling you names, you are not the only one. You should never allow your blog to become a harbor for offense and denigration.

Cartoon credit: Guhmshoo.

• 2009/08/13 -- Michael Arrington or Prominent PR, Who Do We Need Least?
• 2010/01/14 -- Pepsi Refresh Becomes the Stale Cola of Marketing Launches
• 2010/01/13 -- Covario Acquisition Emphasizes the Power of SEM
• 2009/11/25 -- StumbleUpon Blows It

About the Author

Mihaela Lica is senior partner at Pamil Visions PR and editor at Everything PR. She is a widely cited authority on search engine optimization and public relations issues (BBC News, Force for Good, Reuters and others), with an experience of over 7 years in online PR and SEO. Mihaela writes for SitePoint, Search Engine Journal, and other online publications. She also maintains a personal blog called eWritings. Follow Mig on Twitter or send her an email at mig [at] pamil-visions [dot] com.

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