Skip to main content
  1. Dispatches/

CrunchGate - 1938 Media

·278 words·2 mins
Articles Journalism Scandal Tech
Daniel Andrlik
Author
Daniel Andrlik lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. By day he manages product teams. The rest of the time he is a podcast host and producer, writer of speculative fiction, a rabid reader, and a programmer.

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media does a great job summarizing many of things going wrong at Techcrunch these days, and it’s an excellent overview of the issues at hand. In particular, Feldman points out a number of important unanswered questions still lingering in the wake of Michael Arrington’s supposed transparency regarding the MacBook Air scandal.

From the post:

At this point it’s obvious that the TechCrunch site is incapable of doing the right thing. There is simply no moral compass over there to guide them so I am once again forced to stop producing puppet shows for a few dozen people and spell it out.

[snip]

[It’s] still not clear is Daniel’s relationship with TechCrunch. Mike Arrington, Editor-In-Chief of TechCrunch, said that Daniel is merely an intern and that “the frequency of [his] posts was light.” If by “light” he means “over a hundred stories” then okay. Daniel states no, he was not an unpaid intern but a part-time employee. The TechCrunch site lists him with a fancy title. Intern, employee, dog sitter, no one is too sure what this kid does. Which is it? It’s February. Did he just get a 1099 or not?

Go give it a read, I think it summarizes many of the reasons that I stopped regularly reading Techcrunch about a year ago, although it leaves out an important one: their policy of posting stories based on rumors from anonymous sources without getting confirmation or performing anything that could pass as journalistic due diligence. I still think it's disgraceful that the tech community at large gives so much influence to a site that is just one small step above being a gossip rag.

Related

Migrating My Site to Hugo
·420 words·2 mins
Articles Go Ssg Personal Tech Assorted Geekery
I feel like “migrating to a different static site generator” is the new “installing a new Linux distro.” It’s something nerds do for almost no reason besides curiosity, boredom, and perhaps no small amount of masochism.
Web3 Grifts
·360 words·2 mins
Articles Web3 Crypto Nft Grift Tech
If you haven’t been following the ongoing saga of incredible grift in the so-called web3 space, I highly recommend checking out the work being done by Molly White, whose site Web3 is going just great is a shocking timeline of the various scams and hacks occurring constantly within the broader “crypto” market.
NYT on the Secret History of Women in Coding
·297 words·2 mins
Articles Tech History
The NYT recently ran a wonderfully in-depth story covering the history of women in coding. The issue of note for the article is that in the beginning of computer science the gender balance among programmers was basically equal.