[kaolinite]

Your customers may not read TechCrunch but they may read The Guardian or the Wall Street Journal and if you want to get an article there, your best bet is to have an article already on TechCrunch and similar sites.

It's the same reason why Hacker News, Reddit and other community-based sites matter more than you might think: it lets journalists at larger companies know that there is interest and that you might be worth writing about.

[tyre]

I think you underestimate the excellent journalists from The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal if you believe that they:

a) cannot find good stories without social proof from TechCrunch b) use TechCrunch as a source for what is up and coming c) value a story already reported in TechCrunch over one that has not received attention.

Your best bet is to build something that matters. Good journalists are smarter than we give them credit for.

[xrange]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churnalism

[larrys]

You are getting downvoted for what you said (as of now anyway) however I have gotten press in the WSJ by sending them clippings that appeared in the local paper. This was after they had no interest in the story initially. In other words seeing that even a lowly local paper (ok was a big city paper actually) did a full page article was enough to get them to run a blurb about what we were doing. (On the front page no less).

So in other words to your point about Techcrunch it can be thought of as it as a filter of legitimacy that you can use to your advantage.