The Tech Journalistic Field
How journalistic coverage impact startup success
The startup economy is a field like the literary field, the artistic and economic field. Like Pierre Bourdieu already stated each field has producers, consumers, and agents and each of these actors' internal and external interactions gives to this field its shape and behavior. Tech journalism is part of the startup economy as a field and in my point of view, the journalistic field plays the agent role in the startup economy. It is interesting to study and see the effect of the journalistic field on the producers say entrepreneurs and consumers that can be geeks or nerds like you and me. First I will simply try to judge the impact of such journalistic work on the success of startup ventures by using simple and maybe obvious data like press coverage of startups by journalistic platforms like TechCrunch, Techmeme, VentureBeat that are also by the effect of an increasing economy driven world both producers and agents because these online press media are also startups by the real economic sense of the word.
To simplify this study I will just take into account past startups of Y combinator and we will be analyzing the relationship between their level of success and their press coverage and the relationships they have with tech journalists. We will also only consider US startups and we will take into account the amount of total funding that each startup has raised as proxies for judging the level of success of each of them, and whether or not these startups ended acquired.
This chart shows the level of TechCrunch coverage of 88 YC startups that ended being acquired. The level of coverage is a custom metric function of the number of articles about the YC startup and the number of times its name was cited.
This chart may not highlight clearly the impact of journalistic coverage on the success of a startup but you can clearly see that there is an opportunity for classifying these startups acquired by the strength of the level of coverage and get as output two groups. One group with a level of coverage over 500 and another below 500. What is the level of coverage effect on the price of acquisition and other factors will be the next step of this analysis of the impact of journalistic coverage on the success of a startup.
PS: Sincerely just complete this draft and published it while I wanted it to be complete before I publish but committed to publishing every and today I have no idea why I published this article that I will try to finish in the future.
