TechCrunch Employs Children To Write Posts, Apologizes for such interns greed

I don’t know what is more disturbing, that TechCrunch employs children ( “not a legal adult” ) to write posts on their highly respected blog ( “This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light.” ) or that the “not a legal adult” decided to ask for bribe to write a post on a startup.

I admire Mike Arrington for coming clean on the bribery issue but will he kindly step up and explain why he employs non-adults to write for his blog. TechCrunch is not your average blog which can be written by pretty much anybody including children. TechCrunch focusses on software startups and is used by VC’s and angels to know about a startup. An exposure in TechCrunch can go a long way in highlighting a fledgling startup on its road to success. And Mike decided to give the task of writing posts in such a blog to under-aged people with probably no real-business experience, unless you are counting flipping burgers as business experience, and definitely no solid experience to write and understand about startups and their business viability.

Mike, I want to hold you to your promise on this: “I promise that we will always maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.”. Why do you employ non-legal-adults to write for such a respected blog. Aren’t you saving on cost at the expense of quality or are the startups you cover aren’t important enough to deserve and experinced adult such as yourself covering them? I think TechCrunch readers would love to know.

As blogs are slowly but surely taking over traditional media, I think the time has come for blogs to also self-regulate themselves and focus more on quality like the traditional newspapers so people can trust them as much as they could newspapers in the past.