TechCrunch

If you’ve worked less than five years in tech PR, you might not remember Jason Kincaid. The East Bay native was 22 when he walked into founder Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch and onto the tech world stage. Four years later, in 2012, Jason walked away.

In Jan. 2016 Alex Wilhelm left a safe, good job at TechCrunch to build a news staff at Mattermark, a startup selling access to rich data on tech startups and investors. Alex is now at rival Crunchbase on a similar mission: infusing smart analysis with numbers that prove the case.

TechCrunch has launched a new event series, Sessions, designed to dive deeply into a single tech topic. Sessions: Justice takes place Jun. 6 in San Francisco. The second, Sessions: Robotics, follows Jul. 17 in Boston. A Los Angeles-based event (AR/VR?) remains unannounced.

If you’ve had difficulty contributing content to TechCrunch gatekeeper Jon Shieber lately, you’re not alone: readers sent us a lot of “what’s-going-on?” emails in recent days. Even after our own email exchange with Jon, it’s still unclear exactly what is going on.

In the wake of recent layoffs at eWeek and InformationWeek, it’s time to keep a closer eye on the pitch opps that remain across the IT media landscape. To that end, here’s the first of a two-part SWMS IT media spot check. Pitch opps, nuggets and more...

One week ago, TechCrunch showcased 23 lucky startups as part of TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Battlefield competition. The winner turned out to be an analytics company that helps gamers play better. The big news for PR -- how do TechCrunch reporters write about cool companies when their bosses say they're cool?

First there was "A/B testing," where a publisher would float two different headlines on their own site and go with the better one. That's still around, but nowadays it's all about "dark testing" on Facebook. TechCrunch does this, as do Refinery29, Fusion and many other titles that publish directly to the FB platform.

Instead of you going to DEMO, what if DEMO came to you? That's the idea behind Traction Technology Partners, founded last December by former DEMO producers Erick Schonfeld and Neal Silverman. Theirs is a complicated business model. But it is the right idea in an era where F2F and community are so symbiotic and will only remain so.

Doug MacMillan will leave the WSJ this summer to become a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University in New York. "There's no plan to announce yet about who will be taking over my beat, but I know that I am leaving the bureau in very capable hands," Doug says.