[trezor]

This had me laughing:

The canonical example of failure in tech journalism is TechCrunch, a blog that once declared Google's MapReduce to be a system that "reduced the links found on the web into a map that search algorithms could run over." Yes, this will do nicely.

While you could say that The register obviously would have an "agenda" to discredit other competing sites, I honestly find The register, despite the snarky style, much more informative and useful than TechCrunch.

[greyman]

TC have been publishing good articles, mediocre articles and quite bad articles. But calling them failure is laughable, I think it's a result of envy combined with fear. TC is their serious competitor, and they know it. If for nothing else, they are usually able to break stories sooner than others. IMHO, Register should better find a ways to improve themselves, their work is not that impressive either.

[theoneill]

It's not The Register that has an obsession with TechCrunch, but this particular writer.

[zimbabwe]

Dziuba doesn't have an obsession with TechCrunch, but with snark in general. Once upon a time he wrote balanced articles criticizing things he didn't like. Then he realized that the more negative he was, the more hits he received, and like many weak-minded tech writers before him, he sold out for the sake of a minor celebrity status.

[scrame]

I dont think he was calling techcrunch a failure of a website, but as a failure of "blogging as journalism". They regularly print speculative, inaccurate articles, rife with spelling errors. Additionally, they try to explain technical concepts that they do not understand (like the map-reduce description above), and their attitude when someone points out the errors is usually along the lines of "whatever".

Passing techcrunch off as "journalism" is what is laughable. Its just gossip and insider PR-hype.