Michael Arrington's Rich Commitment to Journalism
TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington was recently caught scrubbing an old blog entry to hide a conflict of interest.Arrington wrote Oct. 27 about Maya's Mom, a Web 2.0 startup aimed for the Oprah crowd that received "around $1 million" in funding. When he wrote about the company in April, he told his readers that Maya's Mom founder Ann Crady Kennedy was one of his peeps:
Disclosure: Ann is a former colleague and so my opinions may be favorably tinted.
This sentence subsequently disappeared, so TechCrunch readers weren't told in October that he was hyping a pal. After he was caught by ValleyWag, Arrington offered a novel defense -- conflicts of interest are what make TechCrunch special:
TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don't fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren't, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. ...
TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn't going to change. I also write about startups. That isn't going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn't come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren't. We never have been. We never will be.
Arrington thinks there's something new in a reporter who trades favorable coverage for access, but his actions put him at the end of a long line of journalistic pretenders. Judith Miller of the New York Times could have made this disclosure during the run up to the Iraq war:
The only way I get access to the information I do is because White House officials are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
Arrington, who recently lost two of his most vocal critics with the shutdown of Dead 2.0 and the firing of ValleyWag writer Nick Douglas, told the Wall Street Journal that he wants the TechCrunch network of sites to compete with CNET.
If that's his goal, he needs to adopt the ethics of journalism and stop making sweetheart deals with the subjects he covers. Every week seems to bring news of another company Arrington has become involved in as an investor, consultant or board member.
I suspect objectivity would interfere with his real goal, which was described to the Journal by another one of his peeps:
Mr. Arrington is a "very ambitious guy," says Keith Teare, the former CEO of RealNames, who notes that Mr. Arrington hasn't stayed at any job for longer than 18 months over the past 10 years. Mr. Teare adds that Mr. Arrington is "extremely focused on money. He wants to be rich."
Mr. Arrington doesn't dispute that. He says he has "never made any real money," even after selling an online-payments company he founded called Achex Inc. to First Data Corp. in 2001. He declines to divulge his net worth but says TechCrunch brings in about $120,000 in revenue a month, mostly from ads, sponsorships, an online job-posting service and the parties it holds.
If Arrington wants to join a world where $1.4 million a year in revenue isn't "real money," he's not going to get there by being a scrupulously ethical journalist.
Review: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
The Night Watch, a novel by Sarah Waters nominated for Britain's prestigious Man Booker Prize, has been written with an enthralling narrative gimmick. Divided into three sections, it tells the story of six characters in wartime London beginning in 1947, stepping back to 1944 and finishing in 1941. You learn where they ended up by page 150 and spend the next 300 pages finding out how they got there.
This turns the events of the story on their head in interesting ways. When one of the characters remarks during the war that "we might all be dead tomorrow," you know they won't. Their fatalism falls on deaf ears; German planes drop bombs night after night that will never find them. As a cheating husband tells his mistress "you wait until after the war ... it'll be the Ritz and the Savoy then, every time," you've already learned with certainty that it's an empty promise.
The story's constructed as a mystery in which the details of the characters' lives are the mystery, so describing them individually would ruin surprises. The six are ordinary people living in London, dealing with World War II and tied together by romance or coincidence. Four of the six are gay -- one newspaper reviewer claims Waters has the literary goal of "writing lesbians back into history" -- but the novel builds on universal romantic obstacles like jealousy, self-esteem and guilt rather than issues particular to sexual orientation.
The author Martina Cole paid £1,000 pounds in a charity auction to be a character in the book. Her money bought her E.M. Cole, a female ambulance driver protective of her cigarettes who has disreputable friends selling black market coffee, soap and lingerie.
The Night Watch is an excellent novel with some violence and biblically unsanctioned sexual content that might turn off James Dobson but not Ted Haggard. I haven't read a book with literary aims this ambitious in years, and clearly I'm missing out.
Editorial Integrity for Sale, Priced to Move
I'm being paid $125 to write this review of ReviewMe, a site that brokers deals between advertisers and bloggers who will review a product or service for a fee. The person who came up with this idea, who calls himself ReviewMe Roy, explains:I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, "how can I provide both valuable feedback and buzz to advertisers in the blogosphere, simultaneously allowing bloggers to increase their revenue while mainting their editorial integrity and true voice?"
I wake up every day and the first thought in my head is, "I need to pee." ReviewMe Roy scares me a little, like those people in McDonald's commercials who've made the "Dollar Menu" their reason for living.
The fee you earn for ReviewMe reviews depends on how highly your weblog is esteemed by Alexa and Technorati and how many people subscribe to your RSS feed. Workbench gets a sweet rate, but only if some company finds it on ReviewMe and puts my editorial integrity in their shopping cart. (One bug: Individual Blogspot blogs are given the entire blog hosting service's Alexa ranking.)
I'll stick with ReviewMe a little while to see whether any company thinks my true voice is worth a one-day rental, but I don't see how bloggers can mix in paid product placements without costing the respect of their audience. The only way to retain the perception of editorial integrity is to criticize the product you've been paid to review, as I'm doing here, but that strategy falls apart the minute you like something.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Charles Krauthammer
In his column today, Charles Krauthammer attempts to spin the election as an earthquake that was oh-so-close to being no big deal, really:... the difference between taking one house vs. both -- and thus between normal six-year incumbent-party losses and a major earthquake that shakes the presidency -- was razor-thin in this election. A switch of just 1,424 votes in Montana would have kept the Senate Republican.
In the final numbers on CNN, Jon Tester defeated incumbent Conrad Burns by 2,847 votes. Krauthammer deftly knocks this number in half to better suggest the closeness of the election.
But he neglects to point out that Montana is so sparsely populated that only 404,000 people voted in that Senate race, making the 2,847-vote margin of victory seem smaller than it is.
Tester smoked Burns by seven-tenths of one percent. That's an extremely close race, but in a more populous state like Florida, which had 4.7 million votes cast in its Senate race, that margin would've been a win by 33,000 votes.
59 of 60 Web Users Prefer the Drudge Report
The ad broker for the Drudge Report says that Matt Drudge's site broke traffic records on Election Day with 2.3 million unique visitors and 25.1 million page views.The scariest part of the press release:
This proves, once again, that when Americans want reliable, unbiased, instant news on what's happening and what's important, they trust Matt Drudge and the Drudge Report to deliver.
Drudge also had 100 million ad impressions that day. If you figure a click-through rate of one percent and 5 cents a click, both of which are on the low end, his two-person site earned $50,000 in 24 hours.
Right-wing critics of the Drudge Retort often taunt me with stuff like this, believing there's karmic justice in Drudge's traffic being so much bigger than ours.
On Election Day, the Retort had 38,900 unique visitors and 100,900 page views. That's microscopic potatoes compared to the Report, roughly one-sixtieth its traffic, but large enough to justify my journalism degree.
Our all-time traffic record is still the day that Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction sent thousands of people to the web for partial frontal celebrity nudity, which nearly melted my server in February 2004.
Rush Limbaugh: 'I Feel Liberated'
I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh today, an experience that has been 140 minutes of unadulterated delight. I had forgotten how enjoyable his show becomes when his party has suffered a crushing defeat from one coast to the other.A few minutes ago, Limbaugh declared that he wouldn't carry President Bush's water any more, tearing into him so harshly that Matt Drudge brought out the siren:
I FEEL LIBERATED... I NO LONGER HAVE TO CARRY THE WATER FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T DESERVE IT
I've attached the audio from part of his rant. Limbaugh, who said he was tired of coming in day after day defending Republicans for this campaign, predicted that Bush will spend the next two years conceding ground to his new Democratic overlords in the hopes it will make him more popular.
Update: Here's six more minutes of Limbaugh beginning the president's lame duck status with a bang.
Other Republican partisans are now claiming they only defended Republicans to help the team win. On Hugh Hewitt's blog today, Dean Barnett made this admission:
In the closing weeks of the campaign season, I felt like I was a lawyer who had a bad client while writing this blog. That client was the Republican Party which had broken its Contract with America from 1994 and had become unmoored from its conservative principles. As its advocate, I couldn't make a more compelling case for Republicans staying in power than the fact that the Democrats would be worse. I believed in that case, but when that's all the party gave its advocates to work with, you can honestly conclude that Republicans got this drubbing the old fashioned way -- we earned it.
If Limbaugh's being honest today, he helped seal the GOP's fate by setting aside his doubts and picking up pom-poms. Before the election, if he had told his audience of millions that Bush and the Republican Congress were going the wrong direction, the toughlove might have prevented the rout.
But I'm not complaining. I'm so happy about this turn of events that I have warm feelings for Markos Moulitsas.
Senate Democrats: 'The Votes are In, and We Won'
People who stayed up late to follow the elections saw a surprising moment in Virginia's Senate race. Trailing by less than one percent, incumbent Sen. George Allen gave a "see ya next morning" speech instead of conceding. A few minutes later challenger Jim Webb took the mike at his rally.Established etiquette for political candidates is to give the loser a chance to concede before making your victory speech. Webb began his remarks with an acknowledgement of Allen and the democratic process, saying that "we all go out, we vote, we argue, we vote."
Then he said something unexpected that was met with the roaring approval of his supporters: "But also I'd like to say the votes are in, and we won." On MSNBC, which missed airing Webb's remarks live, Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann reacted immediately with slack-jawed amazement.
This is how the game is played post Bush v. Gore, and if Democrats want the Senate they'll show they learned something in 2000.
Six years ago, George W. Bush emerged from election night with a 1,784-vote lead in Florida and was treated by the media as the winner of the presidential election. This was a dubious claim -- Florida's voting process was a mess and either candidate could have overcome that margin in a thorough accounting of votes cast. As days passed, Gore faced increasing pressure to quit pursuit of a recount, even from members of his own party.
This morning in Virginia, with 99.8 percent of the votes counted, here's the results:
Jim Webb (D): 1,171,813
George Allen (R-Incumbent): 1,164,767
In Montana, with more than 99 percent of the votes cast, here's the results:
Jon Tester (D): 194,194
Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Incumbent): 193,179
When you factor in their respective populations, a 1,015-vote lead in Montana is comparable to a 7,046-vote lead in Virginia. Both leads are significantly larger, by percentage of population, than Bush's original lead over Gore in Florida.
If the media treats this election the same way, the votes are in, and we won.
Webb and Tester should be considered the winners of their races, not the candidates who are leading pending a recount. The Democrats have retaken the Senate. With every day that passes -- a recount in Virginia will take at least a month -- Burns and Allen will fall further into the same trap as Al Gore. There's no patience for a drawn-out voting dispute in our short-attention-span media. By next week, if the two Republican incumbents are still chasing votes, they'll be derided as sore losermen.
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