The title should actually be "How I trick all of you into reading this story". I'm probably not alone in hoping that this story contained some slick hack.
+1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.
The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.
Yeah, started skimming it, looked at what betalist is (startup reporting service)... link on startupnews to post by startup founder of startup tracking service on how he got coverage from a startup oriented news site for his startup. This is some inception-level circle jerking IMO. "The best minds of our generation" :)
How I tricked Hacker News into reading about my writing about how I tricked TechCrunch into writing about my startup.