The news that was floating all over the web last weekend was the rumored post by Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch titled Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?.
After the ‘leaked U2 album’ mishap, the RIAA was looking to investigate the matter in details (which was understandable) but TechCrunch,a silicon valley tech blog crafted a whole story around a tip(with no facts backing it up) that TechCrunch received which claimed that Last.fm,a music listening web service passed over the music listening data details to RIAA and is supposedly helping out RIAA in singling out individuals who are the early listeners to the leaked U2 album.
This would help RIAA identify the ‘show spilling individuals’ and possibly convict them. Last.fm staffers(from founder to other folks) had their weekend pissed off,answering countless folks on emails,Twitter,forums,phone calls that the so called breaking news TechCrunch has written about is a “Complete bullshit”. Richard Jones,Last.fm’s co-founder commented on the Techcrunch’s blog post saying:
I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.
Later,Richard Jones wrote an official post on the last.fm blog titled TechCrunch are full of shit.He clarified every part of Last.fm’s Terms of Service and clearly denied any such news to be true. But Erick,the TechCrunch blogger who wrote this post,rather than apologizing for defaming the popular music service Last. FM, projected his post as a ‘rumor’ and kept questioning Last.fm’s responses in one way or the other.
Now,here’s the problem with TechCrunch…It’s less about writing a rumored post and defaming a popular music brand on the web but it’s more about committing the blunder one just did.
TechCrunch has always been adamant on its part from the beginning, irrespective of any false/defaming journalism that.If they go terribly wrong,they try turning the story in a different direction or bombard other engaging posts to simply divert the public attention.
And we would rather call this the ‘Digg Greed’.Once you hit ‘Digg’,you know how much it’s worth is.And TechCrunch seems to be addicted to it now.TechCrunch,whenever writes any such controversial stuff(like this),the post makes it to Digg,Techmeme and hundreds of other blogs.
This brings even more revenues to TechCrunch than they could generate otherwise with a single post and considering an exceptional case of TechCrunch only,which probably hits Digg homepage 8-10 times a month,they are forced to write(rather ‘craft’) such a stuff on a regular basis to keep up with the habit of ‘Pagehits Bonanza’.
But TechCrunch has forgotten one important principle of Journalism. With Power comes Responsibilities…and hence when TechCrunch is in a position where it has enough influence on the web then they must understand that they’re becoming more and more responsible.
This incident is a sheer irresponsible act by TechCrunch and one can now figure out the reasons ‘Why Michael Arrington got spat on’….