Despite firing an executive, Business Insider still sucks

Dan Mitchell of SF Weekly writes that Business Insider is still a bad website even after firing its chief technology officer.

Mitchell writes, “Most of Business Insider bears Blodget’s mark. It’s full of slideshows and other crap meant not to inform, but merely to generate clicks. And it’s full of a lot of stupidity. One of my favorite encounters with the site was when I read a post by reporter Nicholas Carlson a few years ago. It was an introduction to this one guy Carlson had recently heard of, Peter Drucker. Carlson decided that his audience of business-news readers just had to hear about this guy, Peter Drucker. So he wrote something up introducing his readers to this guy, Peter Drucker.

“Peter Drucker is the most famous management theorist in history. It’s a little hard to conceive of an English lit major not having heard of the guy. A writer for a site devoted to business? Jesus.

“But let’s give Carlson the benefit of the doubt and say it’s possible for a person to work full time as a business journalist without ever having heard of Peter Drucker. Even then, Carlson went on to assume that his readers had never heard of him, either, and just had to be informed. His readers, of course, let him know that they had, in fact, heard of Peter Drucker, and made big fun of Carlson in the comments.

“Another Business Insider writer, Joe Weisenthal, was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year. The mag basically characterized him as an obsessive-compulsive who spends every minute of every day publishing. Not writing, so much: publishing. Whether tweets or blog posts, his goal was only to get stuff up, almost no matter what it might be. Every utterance by some regional Fed official, every meaningless analyst report, every unsurprising earnings announcement — all was given the same weight. Usually, that weight was heavy — he treated (and still treats) every bit of news as being a big deal.”

Read more here.