There's no "formal agreement," because we don't have the power to dictate to startups we fund how they should deal with the press. We tell them, as I would tell any founder, that it is good to be covered in TC, and TC is generally willing to write about them, because they know YC is a genuinely good source of leads. Each one of these startups has already been selected from among many applicants.
This is absolute B.S. I work for an online tech pub (The Industry Standard), and we have also attended YC events and reported on YC startups. There was never any restrictions on the timing of our reports other than what individual YC-funded entrepreneurs (not YC!) requested.
I believe that PG and JL have enough on their plates without having to micromanage press coverage to give Techcrunch this sort of edge -- they seem to be much more interested in simply introducing press to founders, and letting the two parties take it from there.
So, Ted Dziuba always strikes me as pretty much negative about everything. I don't know him personally, but everything I've ever read by him has been hyper-critical of everybody involved in our industry. And yet, he's involved in the industry as well (he has some kind of media startup or something, that I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up), and so ought to have a sympathetic view of the trials and tribulations of this life.
Attacking everybody and everything just doesn't seem like a healthy way to approach life to me, and whenever I read his articles, I'm tempted to respond in kind and explain what a douche he's being...which is then transferring the unhealthy attitude onto me.
I didn't realize uncov was a Dziuba effort, or I would have skipped it. And next time I will. Life is too short to spend it railing against everything and everybody, and I certainly don't want to get sucked up into his hate maelstrom.
I don't really buy this for a number of reasons, which is not to say that YC companies don't do exclusives with TC, but the author makes it sound way too shady.
I think the more interesting question might be why does this sound shady. It's not coincidental. People have a tendency to regard press 'deals' as very shady and be very suspicious that they are occurring.
Michael Arrington has made no secret (in the past, at least) of the fact that he HATES being scooped and LOVES to get exclusives. And so he should! He's trying to run the best blog in the game, so unless a piece of news is truly massive, why does he need to run non-exclusives?
As such, it's no real surprise that a lot of Y Combinator startups make it on to TechCrunch. As pg explains above, Y Combinator pretty much tells their startups this, and if they give Arrington an exclusive, that coupled with pg's reputation can seal a story pretty easily.
No "best of class" publication tries to operate under such an edict. It's absurd when you think about it. The Wall Street Journal breaks some killer stories, but also reports on all of the day's news. If they didn't no one would subscribe, they'd wait to hear about the exclusives from someone else who provided all the news. More over, these publications practice actual journalism and go get the news instead of waiting to be briefed by some web 2.0 jack ass "exec".
I work for Georgia Tech's (I hate to use the term) incubator. Very different types of startups come out of there than YC. But media and investors come to us every day looking for new companies. Why? Because we see a lot of deals and vet them. YC does the same thing. Angels, VCs, and TC know that PG sees a lot and only accepts the best. PG is the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval for Web app startups.
its simple really, Arrington trusts PG's judgement on what is a good or a bad startup, so he covers them so that he can be one of the first ones to cover the next reddit
I don't read TC because the signal/noise ratio is not good for me, sometimes there is some interesting article but most of the things are rumors, startups with no relevancy covered, and so on. I guess there is space for the Ars Technica of the web...
I know this is more a news site about development startups but I bet that one of the best kind of startups one can build today is content startups. The internet is big and full of users but good stuff to read are rare.