TechCrunch’s Panzarino on its role in tech news

The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel interviewed outgoingTechCrunch editor Matthew Panzarino about his job and the site.

Here is an excerpt:

How do you balance TechCrunch’s role? Because that always felt very difficult to do standalone journalism but then also be so deeply enmeshed in the industry as one of its most important elements.

One of my pithy sayings, which my writers will probably groan if they listen to this podcast — which I don’t advise they do, they’ve heard all this before — but one of my pithy sayings is that TechCrunch needs to stand close enough to the fire to feel the heat but not close enough to be hypnotized by the flames.

The difference between TechCrunch and a broader publication or a very good, very well-staffed, very astute bureau at a larger paper of record like The New York Times or the Journal or whatever — I’m not singling anybody out, but like, any one of those great chunks of tech writers that exist within a larger organization — the differential between us and them is that we very, very, very specifically wanted to be as fast and close to this stuff as possible without, of course, abandoning all reason.

Skating that edge literally is our job. Or the job of TechCrunch, I should say. The idea that you would be able to suss out nascent trends or new bits of technology that were being productized out of the ether, out of academic programs, or out of new technological discoveries, or remixes, as we all know, of traditional businesses that were enabled by… you strap a database to a laundromat and you’ve got a business, right? Whatever the form that took, we knew that it was going to be happening at the edges and continued to be happening at the edges. These days, it is a little bit different, and the new editor-in-chief of TechCrunch and whoever takes it on from here will have their own job because I think, like you, that we are at a watershed moment not only for media but also for tech.