Interesting.

Neither of the TC intern's emails are quoted. We get to take Arrington's word for it that "Peter responded politely."

The CEO's email looks curt and impolite, but we have no way of knowing whether that's because the CEO is a jerk, or because there's a mollifying second half to that email that Arrington didn't feel like publishing.

In the past I've basically ignored TC because I thought they were kind of silly. Question for anybody who follows this more closely than I do -- is Tech Crunch making the transition from "waste of time" to "unambiguous parasite" ?

The interns emails are posted in the comments. They really aren't that bad, and definitely dont warrant such a response from a CEO in my opinion

No, the intern's emails aren't that bad. Frankly, I don't think that Price's emails are that bad either. None of this warrants being made public.

The intern replied with the TIME 100 article when asked about TechCrunch. I thought that was a bit over the top, and a dig at the CEO for DARING to not know who Mike Arrington is.

That sense of entitlement on the part of TechCrunch and the people associated with it is why it's losing value so rapidly.

The balloon has popped, the shark has been jumped, the welcome has been overstayed;

This story reinforces what Tech Crunch is to me, as I commented a few days ago:

"Yes, TC is a click generator fueled by drama."

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205986)

... I'm even happier now to have unsubscribed from their useless, noisy little RSS feed.

Speaking of RSS, when is Feedburner going to adjust their dramatically inflated "subscriber" count that is featured prominently on sites like TC? 785K looks good and all, and at least the numbers from site to site are relative, but I'd rather see accurate numbers (not a number akin to 'hits')

I love how Arrington continually says that the email was sent to [email protected], except that it would be pretty damn rare for a startup to have an actual PR department. And anyway, if a company doesn't want to release information to the press, they aren't required to do so, no matter if it's TechCrunch or the f'n Times asking. Arrington getting offended when the request was rebuked just comes off as pugilistic.

Four years since starting my organization, [email protected] still redirects to my email address (as the founder & Director). As if TechCrunch doesn't know that's what small companies & organizations do!

Sigh. Can we have a ban of techcrunch? Pretty please?

I'll second that.

Just to venture a guess, I think the problem with HN isn't only signal/noise ratio, but the amount of signal--there might not be enough.

They occasionally have good content... Maybe a way to aggressively bury TC content would be nice?

And yet we have a sensationalist article about brain surgeons' cell phones shoot to the top spot?

Good luck getting people to be picky.

Did Price actually tell them to "f*ck themselves" or was that just made up for sensationalism?

You get one guess, keep in mind that Arrington authored the post.

This is the same kind of sensationalist drama-laden "inference" reporting that Arrington got criticized for with the Yang "We're Done" article.

It's really ridiculous, but I guess we have to remember that TC isn't a news outlet, it's a blog. Sometimes, MA is going to blog about what he's eating for lunch.

There are plenty of people/startups/companies who have never heard of TC.

Seems these are people who generally just get on with things in thier own way in thier own markets, free from hype.

Why blog when a tweet will do?

"Emailed tunecore. They said fu. Boo hoo."

100 characters to spare.

Maybe because Twitter was down?

/thank you folks, I'll be here all week

The brilliance was that TuneCore got all this publicity from rebuking Arrington. Maybe that is the key to making the front page of TC: be politely rude to them.

Arrington is such a drama queen.

(Disclosure: I’ve been a user since [almost] day one and have contributed to the Tunecore blog)

Here's my comment (#209) on the original thread:

I would love it if we could start hearing about more businesses that are growing out of existing industries that are leveraging the Net (rather than SV startups leveraging the Net to get into existing industries).

Another example in the music domain would be SonicBids.

Concentrating so much on SV just leads to too much irony:

TuneCore is probably THE most revolutionary music-focused web service (esp in terms of business model innovation) and they’ve been pulling in real revenue with a real, sustainable revenue stream that solves extreme problems for its customers for years.

To top it off, they have probably THE most intelligent strategic partnership (w/ Guitar Center) of any web-based business.

I agree that a) there’s only so many hours in the day, b) the Valley is the most important place in the world for software innovation, and c) much of the work TechCrunch does is very valuable, but it would be nice to see more “worldly” coverage [for lack of a better term].

Can anyone explain why this comment was downmodded?

Is it because I syndicated something that was posted elsewhere?

I feel like what I wrote here brought a lot of context to this story, especially given my background as a musician and record label manager.

TIA for any insight

Arrington seems to have ego issues? Lots of melodrama lately.

Talk about sensational headlines, read the title at the top of this page. I don't think he wrote it because they'd never heard of techcrunch, he wrote it because of the bizarre response from what was supposed to be the PR e-mail address of their company. Also, read the comments of the techcrunch posts and he provides their own e-mails.

Arrington may be a douche, but this thread is very sensationalist

To me the interesting part of this story is the advice to 'not cold contact the CEO'. If you have multiple email addresses coming into one box you'd better keep track which one a message is from and respond appropriately. There's nothing wrong about cold contact at a press@ address. As far as him not know what TechCrunch is...that part is pleasing. ;-)

Slow news day

Maybe I just buy into Arrington's BS, but the tunescore guy comes off like a jackass. Maybe Techcrunch doesn't deserve extra special treatment, but it is the primary startup news site. "Who are you?" is a clueless response, especially from a tiny company that needs all the coverage it can get.

I agree it was a pretty bad reply. It doesn't take a couple of seconds to go to google, see who you're dealing, and notice that they could be potentially useful to you as a business..

However, maybe it was a stressful day and they had a heap of spam or irritating emails trying to sell them stuff.