[petercooper]

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.

[jonknee]

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".