Former TechCrunch managing editor Danny Crichton writes about the demise of TechCrunch+.
Crichton writes, “TechCrunch had all the ingredients: the money, the audience, the editors plus a massively sprawling horde of newly-christened startup unicorns to go profile. My target list had hundreds of potential companies on it.
“What was missing, in the end, were the writers themselves, a sociological puzzle that took about two years for me to understand. Thanks to digital media economics the past two decades, business journalism had been wrecked by downsizing, limiting or outright ending the careers of thousands of reporters. A small proportion of them still thrived at major financial publications like Bloomberg or The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, but they were obviously unavailable to write for TechCrunch.
“What I came to discover is that each freelancer would be a case study of an industry in turmoil. There was the one who used to write magazine cover stories who demanded a payment of $100,000 to write a feature (a sum so wildly out of sync with the present economics of the media industry that I questioned how he could be a business reporter at all). There was the one who was so overwhelmed by the daunting prospect of writing an in-depth feature, he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital for treatment with no notice. Then there were those who struggled to coherently weave a lengthy profile together, since they were so used to churning out clickbait articles, any story above 500 words proved a narrative impossibility.”
Read more here.
