5th
17 and Stupid
This year at CES I spent some time with the CrunchGear team. They are really a great group of passionate tech people. I even got to play the below prank on Matt when we were having drinks.
One of the people who wrote for CrunchGear Daniel Brusilovsky a bright, funny and I will say this with caution a “good” 17 year old kid just was caught taking bribes for posts.
When I was his age I did some pretty stupid things. One of them I was arrested for (it later turns out I was actually not arrested, my dad just convinced the cops to “pretend” to press charges, long story). Anyway I do not always agree with Jason Calacanis but his thoughts below on Daniel’s miss-deeds are 100% on the money in my opinion.
What Daniel did is a serious offense. His apology on his blog does not show he understands the severity of the issue. As Jason said I too hope that the people around him like his parents will get him to understand how severe his actions were.
Also as a person who was once a 17 year old degenerate I hope that Daniel is able to learn from this and move on as he is a talented and smart kid who hopefully has a bright future ahead of him.
Michael Arrington handles every publisher/editor’s worst nightmare—an editor extorting subjects for coverage—professionally and with complete transparently. Well done to Mike. The horrible part of this story is that the editor who was asking for a MacBook Air for a post on TechCrunch (it seems more than once, and at least once with an actual computer being given) was a loved 17-year old people considered a prodigy in the publishing space. Young people make mistakes and this is a non-trivial one. This will follow Daniel for a long time, and I hope that his parents, friends and co-workers spend a lot of time discussing this issue with him in the coming days, weeks and months. Finally, although this is a very serious issue, there are many worse things that young people have done. There are teens arrested every month for committing violent crimes like assault, rape and even murder. I’m grateful to the TechCrunch staff for handling this professionally and with dignity, and I hope that Daniel immediately apologizes and gets some counseling. His first apology, titled “the line was crossed” doesn’t scream of complete ownership—in fact it has a plug for his “teens in tech” conference in it. You extorted people, you didn’t cross a line Daniel. There is a huge difference between making a mistake or crossing a line and pre-meditated, and in fact illegal, acts like this. I fear Daniel doesn’t actually realize the gravity of what he did just yet, or he wouldn’t be promoting his conference and not coming completely clean about what exactly happened and why he did what he did. I’m certain he will, at some point soon, understand how serious this is.
