By Ryan Holiday 8/29/12 2:20pm

opinion

OFFTHEMEDIA

Forget Lehrer and Zakaria—Most Online Journalism Is Rotten to the Core

The state of journalism is bad. Of course, Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria—high-profile writers at The New Yorker and Time, respectively—were recently exposed as frauds and plagiarists, but that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. The phone-tapping scandal that nearly imploded NewsCorp’s news division last year? Nope.

In fact, nothing illustrates the distressing state of affairs more clearly than the reaction to Judge William Alsup’s recent order that Google and Oracle turn over the names of the reporters and bloggers whom the two companies had paid for potentially positive coverage supporting their case in a high-stakes copyright lawsuit.

Wait, what reaction? Oh, you didn’t even hear about this? Read More

By Foster Kamer 2/03/12 7:19pm

LOL

Ms. Tsotsis, Freedom Fighter (or something like it).

TechCrunch Blogger Continues Trying to Get Fired, Openly Laughing at Arianna Huffington (and her ‘Nap Rooms’)

We’ve previously documented the wonderfully instigation-happy writing style of Alexia Tsotsis, the TechCrunch blogger who clearly knows something about severance packages at AOL that everyone else doesn’t. Because she’s at it again, writing like she wants to get fired, or at least test the limits of TechCrunch’s autonomy and/or Arianna Huffington’s patience. Read More

By Foster Kamer 12/22/11 3:52pm

IMPRESSIVE DISPLAYS OF CHUTZPAH

Ms. Tsotsis, Freedom Fighter (or something like it).

TechCrunch Writer, Blogging on TechCrunch: ‘I’m Beginning to Feel Stupid for Still Being Here’

Alexia Tsotsis was a well-liked and popular tech blogger before she was at TechCrunch, back when she was at SF Weekly. She became even more well-liked and popular when Michael Arrington corralled her into going to TechCrunch, which was shortly before AOL bought the site out and promised Michael Arrington the full editorial autonomy to be as combative and belligerent with his new ownership as he had been with anyone with the past. Not long after, AOL chief content capo Arianna Huffington pushed Michael Arrington out to show him just how much autonomy the irascible feeding-hand-biting blogging mogul had. Because TechCrunch’s chief Kool-Aid mixer, Mr. Arrington, was out of the picture, some of the best TechCrunch writers on staff started quitting. Ms. Tsotsis has held out.

It is now safe to say she appears tired of holding out. Read More