Popular tech news site TechCrunch took a swing at the Financial Times today, claiming it scooped a Microsoft / News Corp agreement days before the paper 'revealed' the deal."Congratulations to the Financial Times. It’s taken them 10 days and three reporters to confirm our previous story," says the post by TechCrunch's European editor, Mike Butcher. It also adds: "The FT has no other new information that hasn’t been previously reported."
The key takeaway from this cleverly-written attack is that the deal itself would form the basis of News Corp de-indexing its news articles from Google, making them exclusive to Microsoft's search engine, Bing, as premium content.
This, argues TechCrunch, will see the world of news split into two - 'slow news', churned out by big publishing houses and released at a controlled rate, and sites like its own, which rely on speed. The very deal they are reporting on appears - quite conveniently - to be a prime example of this polarisation already happening.
With the established publishing houses re-evaluating their distribution models and the world of news continuing to accelerate and fragment, TechCrunch is throwing down the gauntlet. While the FT wins on trust, analysis and impartiality against gossipy, unpredictable sites like TechCrunch, the uneasy balance of power might not last for long.
All TechCrunch needs to do is temper that gung-ho approach to journalism to bring it on to the right side of trustworthy. All the traditional news outlets need to do is work out how to deliver content more quickly using a viable online model that doesn't put them out of business...
3 comments:
Nice analysis but if you make the TechCrunch's of the world more like the FT's and vice versa, where's the attraction to either for the readers? I read TechCrunch because it is amusing, inflamatory and often the first to publish, but I don't trust it because the speed it works out means it can't be accurate. I read the mainstream papers for more in-depth analysis and the greater knowledge their journalists tend to have and I'm happy to pay for it.
Remove the speed from one and the accuracy from the other and both models are screwed. The silver bullet is to be fast and accurate but unfortunately that's quite a feat to pull off
TechCrunch gets things right, but just as often gets things wrong - see their playground catfight with Last.fm. There's a balance between getting things up and getting things right.
The thing is, people read Techchrunch for one news sector normally, the FT covers many sectors in many countries. There's a place for both.
Also, as far as we know, it may well be that the FT had the Bing story days earlier but it wasn't deemed important enough to the general readership. After all, it is very early days.
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