Sirota and Ames are good journalists but Pando isn't conflict-of-interest free:
Pando Spikes a Post Critical of a Company It Shares Investors With
The crookedest little bloghouse in Silicon Valley just hit a new low, it appears: A negative story about Birchbox, a beauty-product site with which Pando shares investors, was deleted shortly after being published. Unfortunately for Pando and the backers it loves so dearly, this is the internet, and nothing ever disappears.
The post—"Is Birchbox starting to hit some scaling woes?"—went up around 9 p.m. ET, and was quickly pulled down without notice. But various spammy aggregation websites republished the post (still available here), as is the case for pretty much any blog post out there, preserving a report that Birchbox is struggling to expand. The story recounted the woes of several anonymous Birchbox customers, who Pando says are flocking to competitors...
http://valleywag.gawker.com/pando-spikes-a-post-critical-of-a-company-it-shares-inv-1522118215
Tech Industry Buys Itself a Mouthpiece
How did Silicon Valleys bigwigs react when their favorite trade publication adopted strict new conflicts of interest policies? They banded together to pay someone else to cover them.
Former TechCrunch reporter Sarah Lacy today launched PandoDaily, and it has quite an impressive roster of investors, including, well, everyone: "Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan and Matt Cohler... funds including the CrunchFund, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel's Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs." OK, not quite every address on Sand Hill Road, but a whole crapload of checkbooks for a wee $2.5 million round.
"It's a long list," Lacy conceded in the announcement. "And there is a simple reason we spread the syndicate widely: This is a news site built for the startup community, so the more of them that are a part of it, the better."
In other words, when all the people financing startups also finance coverage of the financing of startups, that's not a conflict of interest so much as an awesome inside track on scoops. Just ask Lacy's investor, contributor and ex-boss Mike Arrington, the TechCrunch co-founder forced out of his own publication when AOL's editorial director took very public umbrage at his plan to invest in the companies TechCrunch covered...
http://gawker.com/5876539/tech-industry-buys-itself-a-mouthpiece/@valleywagstaff
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