[ilamont]

Legend has it that at one point an irate German entrepreneur spit on Mike at an event, leading us all to have a profound distrust of humanity.

This wasn't a legend. Arrington talked or wrote about it, I can't remember where. Maybe in one of his essays explaining why he was going to Hawaii to take a months-long break. He said he was at a conference and someone came up to him and spit in his face, and then walked away without saying a word. As I recall, he regarded the incident as a turning point that prompted soul-searching about what he was doing.

Traffic was paramount and ad sales were vital, so niche startup posts, posts that everyone once read but were now read by the company, lost their value. Over time, the value of a traditional TC story waned.

Nearly every newsroom has struggled with this for more than 15 years. The only media orgs that have been able to escape or partially escape the black hole of clickbait are by massive scale/subscriber counts (NYT, FT) or those funded by sales at some other profitable branch of the company, such as Bloomberg (terminals).