Breaking: Michael Arrington Responds to AOL/TechCrunch Acquisition Rumors with Potentially Suicidal Segway Rides, Truancy →
If you’re a tech blogger and you get a good rumor like this at the right time, you run it, because there’s great traffic in it, and you turn off your bullshit detector to ratchet up the buzz on your story, which — even if it isn’t true — is a win/win for Arrington: to even have his company and “acquisition” being talked about in the same sentence by semi-serious tech bloggers is a score in and of itself. It’s like going to ComicCon and blogging about a “rumor” you heard that Iron Man 3 shows Robert Downey Jr.’s twelve-inch penis: whether or not it happens, the press and the subject win, despite the readily available scrutiny regarding it.
Something something something, tech journalists, Iron Man 3, Robert Downey Jr.’s peen. There’s a formula for reader payoff, and I think I have it backwards.
