TechCrunch’s Twitter Documents? A Little Bluerbird Told Them

To me, the most interesting thing about the recent leak and subsequent publishing of secret internal documents from Twitter was not the information revealed about Twitter – we all know they fancy themselves to be in a deathmatch with Google and Facebook – but how TechCrunch’s decision to publish them raises once again a slew of questions about journalistic practices. The death of Walter Cronkite on Friday was a timely sort of metaphor for the kind of questions to which I’m referring; Cronkite’s famous We Are Mired In A Stalemate broadcast during the Vietnam war was a symbol of everything I admire about great journalists, and why, in decades past, I might have actually wanted to be one. TechCrunch’s decision to publish is an excellent 21st century example of 19th century British newspaper and publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe’s statement that “News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising“. After pointing out that Twitter is their largest source of outside traffic after Google in June, TechCrunch has turned around and bitten the hand that feeds them. Which raises a couple of interesting questions: Are they somehow upholding some value of journalism by informing the public, or are they merely capitalizing on a tremendous traffic generator? And will it backfire? While this is in fact one of the biggest stories no-one cares about (it was barely even a hot topic on Twitter, ironically), it still highlights one of the key problems faced by journalism which is outlined in one of my favorite books of the past few years, The Elements of Journalism. And that question is: if news makes its money from ads, how can it hope to maintain any kind of integrity?