Steve Spillman

My short personal anecdote about TechCrunch.

So earlier this year I used to write this blog about Twitter for Slate’s business site, The Big Money, and I just spent all my time tracking down business deals and bugs and just anything that had anything to do with Twitter, and sometimes that meant watching TechCrunch for the stories that they had the money and the reporter-power to track down before anyone else.

But this one time I had what was really a pretty insignificant scoop where I noticed something that felt sort of major that nobody else had noticed at that point. TechCrunch and Mashable were reporting the story without noticing the huge glaring error that only I, the little guy, noticed! Felt cool.

So within about ten minutes the TechCrunch writer (who I won’t call out because she/he seems like a perfectly nice person) updated their post (without any sort of UPDATED tag, or anything, mind you) with a link to my story saying something TechCrunchy like “Twitter has made a rather embarrassing error, notes Steve Spillman of The Big Money,” and that felt awesome. 

And then ten minutes later I checked back and the post was updated AGAIN (and AGAIN there was no tag that mentioned it had been updated) and the scoop that I had was just reprinted there without attribution and without a link and without my name so it looked like they had discovered it and all these people were retweeting them and saying “Nice find TechCrunch!” etc. and then Twitter fixed the problem a couple of minutes later.

And I really wanted to call them out but, you know, you can’t just do that, because first of all who cares, the story’s already over, and second of all, who’s going to listen, and third of all, complaining little blogger is an annoying personality to have. But it sucked. 

Also Michael Arrington, who is not the blogger in question, seems like kind of a dick, but you knew that.

And that’s why I hate TechCrunch and why I hope they die a slow death under AOL’s watch.

Notes:

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