User:RoySmith/essays/Suboptimal corporate sources
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When reviewing articles about companies, I often see a number of the same common sources cited. Many of these, I consider to be poor sources for demonstrating that a company meets WP:NCORP.
- TechCrunch. This is the quintessential publication covering tech startups. It is certainly a reliable source in the sense that the factual content can generally be relied upon to be accurate. They've been around for a long time (by tech standards), they have a full-time staff of writers and provide editorial oversight. The problem is, much of what's published by TechCrunch fails WP:AUD and WP:ORGIND. What typically happens is a company executes some routine action such as closing a round of funding, entering into a merger/acquisition agreement, launching a new product, laying off a bunch of employees, etc. These may be major events to the company, but they're routine in the sense that they happen every day in the business world. The company issues a press release, sends it to all the media that cover the business world, and TechCrunch turns that into an article.