Neither of the TC intern's emails are quoted. We get to take Arrington's word for it that "Peter responded politely."
The CEO's email looks curt and impolite, but we have no way of knowing whether that's because the CEO is a jerk, or because there's a mollifying second half to that email that Arrington didn't feel like publishing.
In the past I've basically ignored TC because I thought they were kind of silly. Question for anybody who follows this more closely than I do -- is Tech Crunch making the transition from "waste of time" to "unambiguous parasite" ?
The intern replied with the TIME 100 article when asked about TechCrunch. I thought that was a bit over the top, and a dig at the CEO for DARING to not know who Mike Arrington is.
Speaking of RSS, when is Feedburner going to adjust their dramatically inflated "subscriber" count that is featured prominently on sites like TC? 785K looks good and all, and at least the numbers from site to site are relative, but I'd rather see accurate numbers (not a number akin to 'hits')
I love how Arrington continually says that the email was sent to press@tunecore.com, except that it would be pretty damn rare for a startup to have an actual PR department. And anyway, if a company doesn't want to release information to the press, they aren't required to do so, no matter if it's TechCrunch or the f'n Times asking. Arrington getting offended when the request was rebuked just comes off as pugilistic.
Four years since starting my organization, Press@NeoSmart.net still redirects to my email address (as the founder & Director). As if TechCrunch doesn't know that's what small companies & organizations do!
This is the same kind of sensationalist drama-laden "inference" reporting that Arrington got criticized for with the Yang "We're Done" article.
It's really ridiculous, but I guess we have to remember that TC isn't a news outlet, it's a blog. Sometimes, MA is going to blog about what he's eating for lunch.
The brilliance was that TuneCore got all this publicity from rebuking Arrington. Maybe that is the key to making the front page of TC: be politely rude to them.
(Disclosure: I’ve been a user since [almost] day one and have contributed to the Tunecore blog)
Here's my comment (#209) on the original thread:
I would love it if we could start hearing about more businesses that are growing out of existing industries that are leveraging the Net (rather than SV startups leveraging the Net to get into existing industries).
Another example in the music domain would be SonicBids.
Concentrating so much on SV just leads to too much irony:
TuneCore is probably THE most revolutionary music-focused web service (esp in terms of business model innovation) and they’ve been pulling in real revenue with a real, sustainable revenue stream that solves extreme problems for its customers for years.
To top it off, they have probably THE most intelligent strategic partnership (w/ Guitar Center) of any web-based business.
I agree that a) there’s only so many hours in the day, b) the Valley is the most important place in the world for software innovation, and c) much of the work TechCrunch does is very valuable, but it would be nice to see more “worldly” coverage [for lack of a better term].
Talk about sensational headlines, read the title at the top of this page. I don't think he wrote it because they'd never heard of techcrunch, he wrote it because of the bizarre response from what was supposed to be the PR e-mail address of their company. Also, read the comments of the techcrunch posts and he provides their own e-mails.
Arrington may be a douche, but this thread is very sensationalist
To me the interesting part of this story is the advice to 'not cold contact the CEO'. If you have multiple email addresses coming into one box you'd better keep track which one a message is from and respond appropriately. There's nothing wrong about cold contact at a press@ address. As far as him not know what TechCrunch is...that part is pleasing. ;-)
Maybe I just buy into Arrington's BS, but the tunescore guy comes off like a jackass. Maybe Techcrunch doesn't deserve extra special treatment, but it is the primary startup news site. "Who are you?" is a clueless response, especially from a tiny company that needs all the coverage it can get.
I agree it was a pretty bad reply. It doesn't take a couple of seconds to go to google, see who you're dealing, and notice that they could be potentially useful to you as a business..
However, maybe it was a stressful day and they had a heap of spam or irritating emails trying to sell them stuff.
Neither of the TC intern's emails are quoted. We get to take Arrington's word for it that "Peter responded politely."
The CEO's email looks curt and impolite, but we have no way of knowing whether that's because the CEO is a jerk, or because there's a mollifying second half to that email that Arrington didn't feel like publishing.
In the past I've basically ignored TC because I thought they were kind of silly. Question for anybody who follows this more closely than I do -- is Tech Crunch making the transition from "waste of time" to "unambiguous parasite" ?