Farewell CrunchGear

I suppose I should have blogged about this when I first saw it so now I’m behind the curve. Oh well. Better late than never.

As part of their CES coverage, CrunchGear, an offshoot blog of TechCrunch, had an interview with Penn, of the famous duo Penn and Teller. Unfortunately, Penn seems to be a very crude, insensitive, and all-around not friendly person.

In particular, he talked about Mormons and their “magic underwear.” As a Mormon, I took offense at that. I don’t make fun of you for you (lack of) beliefs, Penn. Why make fun of mine? If you are going to be a public figure, you should at least try to not be ignorant.

Then there is the whole deal with CrunchGear. First, I don’t even see why they had the interview. Maybe if they hadn’t been interviewing people who don’t have anything to do with the tech industry, they could have seen more stuff at CES. Then they decided to run the interview. That makes them equally as guilty in insulting a religion.

In response to the CrunchGear interview, several people have called to boycott the entire TechCrunch network. This charge is led particularly by Jesse Stay in an article located here. The word is primarily being spread through two Facebook applications: LDS Life, and The LDS App, which Stay recently sold to The More Good Foundation, a distinctly LDS related organization. There is even a Facebook group for the boycotting effort (though it only has 24 members).

The thing is, I don’t agree with those boycotting efforts. [From here on out is similar to the comment I made on Jesse Stay's post.] I am boycotting CrunchGear, but I’m not going to boycott everything “Crunch.” From what I’ve seen of how the TechCrunch network appears to work, CrunchGear is something of an oddity. It doesn’t really mesh as well with all of the other Crunch sites. It also appears to be completely under its own control. TechCrunch is really pretty good. They report news, and when they inject opinion it seems to be sensitive, relevant, and well-thought-out. CrunchGear, on the other hand, seems to be pretty casual. Casual to the point of being unprofessional. I would say that they are more of a personal team blog about gadgets by people who just happen to have connections.

In the end, I’d have to say that people shouldn’t boycott TechCrunch (it’s the same kind of reason as those disclaimers about DVD commentaries) but they should boycott CrunchGear. There are better sites to get gadget news from anyway. Also, TechCrunch should watch CrunchGear a little more closely or drop them entirely, before they become a serious liability.

[You may have noticed that I didn't link to the original CrunchGear post that sparked this whole thing. That's because I'm boycotting them. If you want to see the original article, Google it or use the link on Stay's article which is linked above. Also, the interview hated on Engadget, which is one reason I linked to them (plus, I like them). So Engadget gets 2 extra cookies. I mean links.]

 

[Immediately-after-posting edit: Whoops! Accidentally copied and pasted two of the links wrong, so I fixed them.]