Viralogy

Why Michael Arrington vs Leo Laporte

Michael Arrington and Leo Laporte are two of the most prominent sources of new technology on the internet. Leo Laporte has been building up an extraordinary reputation through decades of radio, television, and now netcast host, while Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch is the newly established authority on the latest analysis and news of startups and technology.

Since both of these giants have a tremendous amount of influence in the social media world, it makes sense for Viralogy to talk about how they are both very different in backgrounds, mediums, personalities and styles. In fact, in many ways, they are complete opposites.

It also just happens that not too long ago, Leo Laporte completely blew up at Michael Arrington after being questioned whether the Palm Pre he was reviewing was given to him for free. This spread all over the internet, received over a staggering 6300 Diggs, and raised the curiosity of many folks in the social mediasphere. Besides sharing the aftermath posts of both Michael Arrington and Leo Laporte’s responses, we want to present the personal side of these two journalists here on Viralogy.

On a quick note, I personally felt that Michael Arrington’s question was very legit and Leo Laporte did overreact a bit. Yes, Leo Laporte does have 30 years of reputation with complete journalist integrity, but this is like asking Ghandi if he brought weapons before seeing the President. One school of thought would say that such a question is insulting Ghandi, while another would say that just because it’s Ghandi doesn’t mean that he can ignore standard procedures.

Backgrounds: Leo Laporte vs Michael Arrington

Even though both Leo Laporte and Michael Arrington are prominent journalists, neither of them was trained as a journalist.

Leo Laporte studied Chinese History at Yale University, but dropped out in his junior year to pursue a career in radio broadcasting. He Co/hosted one of the earliest radio shows on computers (Dvorak on Computers and Laporte on Computers) in 1991. He then went on to run the shows Internet! for PBS, The Personal Computing Show on CNBC, and The Site on MSNBC, where he won an Emmy Award.

Later on, Leo Laporte moved into the Cable and Satellite Television space with The Screen Savers and Call for Help and The Lab with Leo Laporte. Finally, he moved onto netcasting with This Week in Tech while still doing the radio show Leo Laporte: The Tech Guy. Today TWiT has about 200,000 downloads per show and focuses on quality live streamed content.

Since Leo Laporte has so much under his belt, I definitely skipped through a lot of the stuff that he did, including more shows, awards and books. But @andrewismusich (a good friend of Viralogy) wrote a song on Leo, so he must be very important. If you really want to get to know more about Leo Laport, check out his very recent interview with Mixergy.

Michael Arrington graduated from the Stanford Law School in 1995, and helped startups move towards IPO under Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He then decided to join the startup Real Names under Keith Teare, but it didn’t work out due to the dot-com bust. Afterwards, he worked on the startup Achex, eventually selling for $32 million.

After working for a bit as a domain buyer and relaxing for a year, Michael joined Keith again in co-founding Edgeio. In order to catch up with the startup world, he started writing his blog Tech Crunch, which immediately became very popular. Six months into Edgeio, Michael Arrington left the company and became full time with Tech Crunch. Today, Tech Crunch is one of the most popular blogs on the internet, along with a Network of other sites like CrunchBase, CrunchGear and much more.

Michael Arrington has so much influence, that people break into his house early in the morning just to beg for some coverage. Wired.com even identifies Michael Arrington as a Blowhard archetype, along with Mark Cuban and Seth Godin, in this amusing flowchart.

Personalities

Leo Laporte has always been a friendly, helpful, and sometimes goofy figure on the internet, whereas Michael Arrington is more cut throat, intense and sometimes very emotional. This is reflected from their backgrounds: Leo Laporte is the DJ that is hip, entertaining, and always there for you, while Michael Arrington is the lawyer that is more critical, combative, and arrogant.

Michael Arrington himself admits that he is prone to excess and uncontrolled outbursts of temper, partying and work. There are times when he deals with criticism in a calm manner,  but many times he will go into tremendous anger and do things like yell at his mentor-ish friend Keith Teare, stating that their friendship is over, only to apologize the next day.

You can also see that very apparently when he was enraged by people’s criticism of him not attending a conference he didn’t sign up for, but then seemed to have calmed down again on the next day.

Michael Arrington does not respond to insults very well (just like any of us), so that’s why he avoids looking at what other people say about him. In a very earnest manner, he says, “I’m human. I’ve put my entire life into this blog, and when I’m attacked, it’s emotional, I’m going to react sometimes — that’s just me. Does that mean I’m flawed? Yeah. Does that mean I’m not being 100 percent efficient about business? Yeah. But it really hurts when people attack me, and I think people who don’t respond aren’t very human or very interesting.” The trajedy is that he is in a combative industry where people are always being offensive and/or defensive on things he says.

Text vs Rich Media

Needless to say, a huge difference between Leo Laporte and Michael Arrington is that one uses rich media platforms with video and voice, whereas the other is focused primarily on text.

Because of Leo Laporte’s engaging and pleasant personality, he has been a trusted favorite amongst radio listeners and TV watchers that are into tech. Video and audio gives the audience an entire experience, and if you are good at giving people pleasant experiences, using rich media might help you connect with your audience better.

I’ve heard that 90% of communication is not what you say, but how you say it. That means with pure text, you are only limited to communicating 10% of what you really wanted to push through. I suspect that’s a bit exaggerated, but with video one can definitely present a lot more complex feelings to the audience, and not just information.

Speaking of video shows, it seems like very very few video shows take off. Some of the ones that don’t take off have very vibrant personalities too. When I look at the ones that are successful, it seems like they are ones that post consistently on a daily basis for an extended period of time, just like Leo Laporte’s shows or Gary Vaynerchuckhttp://garyvaynerchuk.com at Wine Library TV. Shows that update once a week seems to have a harder time getting critical mass. I suspect this is because of the high setup cost of starting to watch a video. If it is not a daily commitment, it’s difficult to remind oneself to check back on “free time”. If you have a video show and want to make it big, it is recommended to post daily. Or at least post on a very set schedule.

On the other side, Michael Arrington’s Tech Crunch is entirely text. Text is the only way Michael Arrington communicates to millions of users throughout the world. And it definitely has its advantages too. With a video/audio file, there is no way to skim the content, and you are often required to pay 30 minutes of your attention to the show. But with text, people can skim in 10 seconds and get the gist of what the article is about.

This is a lot more fitting for Michael Arrington’s audience, since many of his readers are entrepreneurs and tech executives who don’t have time to sit down and listen to a 30 minute speech. Leo Laporte’s audience tends to be more tech lovers who are deliberately trying to spend more time on the internet trying to find new cool stuff.

Also, text is a lot more accessible and portable. It’s easy to have an RSS feed sent to your email. It’s easy to read text blogs on your iPhone while waiting in line. It’s also easier to send friends useful quotes that is presented in the content. None of that is as easy with audio and video files.

Finally, if the content is no longer up to date, it is much more difficult to go through dozens of archived audio files to find something interesting, but it is much easier to find an old article that is insightful for the reader.

Knowing the advantages of text, Leo Laport also has a blog, but it really looks more like a “microblog”.

Michael Arrington’s Emotionally Intense Writing Style

In terms of style, Arrington is definitely more critical, and in some way darker. His writing presents a low-tone, aggressive, intense but also intellectual feel that grabs the readers and convinces them forcefully that he knows what he is talking about.

However, since Tech Crunch is also considered his own personal blog, he sometimes create posts that just damages a startup for personal reasons.

Like in this post, Michael Arrington pretty much says, “Usually we would really like services like these, but since the Founder has some personality problems, it will most likely fail.” What he said might be completely true, but posting it publicly on a blogpost with that being the main point just invites potential trouble, which is shown with his recent UK lawsuit headache. In this way, Michael Arrington sometimes writes posts from a very emotional standpoint, similar to how Penelope Trunk would just bash a random guy who pissed her off.

Along the same lines, when Michael Arrington lost a valuable opportunity because of Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, he immediately writes a blogpost title With Friends like These, telling the world about his frustrations with these two. He states that prior to Tech Crunch, he assumes that everyone is trustworthy until proven otherwise. After he started Tech Crunch, that reversed.

Besides exerting emotional pressure into his posts, Michael Arrington does a respectable job in always being direct, opinionated, and open. He nicely addressed how it is impossible to be completely objective, and it is better to just recognize that and still write with brute honesty instead of pretend it’s not there. He is also very consistent in his criticisms too, and does not hesitate to rip his friends’ companies or his own invested startups apart.

Even though because of his direct style he has received numerous death threats and got spat on the face, at the end of the day, you will see that Michael’s just a passionate startup writer who still has a heart and cares about people. You can tell that he really appreciates it when people genuinely treat him well when they are not looking to get more press.

Leo Laporte’s Popular Internet Presidency

Life with Leo Laporte is simpler compared to Michael Arrington. As Leo Laporte explains himself, all he has to do is to talk in front of a camera and people love him for it. Leo Laporte is generally the peace maker and supporter. Jason Hiner from ZDNet says that “he has shown a remarkable ability to bring together a lot of strong personalities and engage them in a constructive dialog about the direction of the technology world.”

Leo Laporte does an amazing job of not only inviting guests to talk about tech, but also making them sound interesting! He’s also incredible at going along with the guests whenever they decided to say something silly or semi-funny. With a personality like that, it becomes easy to like him and get fully immersed in his passion on tech. That’s why Leo Laporte has some of  the most avid fan base that follow him and actually care about him, a big milestone in social media (as opposed to getting a lot of “followers” and “traffic”).

In an interesting mock election hosted by Tech Republic, Leo Laporte won the election by far and became the mock President of the Internet. Interestingly, in a discussion regarding his “cabinet”, he appoints Michael Arrington as the Secretary of War. Looks like it’s going to take Michael Arrington some work if he ever wants to get rid of his aggressive reputation.

Right now, Leo Laporte’s ambition is to create the CNN of tech on the interenet. TV Squad believes that he can do it….kinda because he has 6 solid weapons under his belt.

Who do you follow more?

Text or Rich Media? The lawyer or the DJ? Internet startups or Hardware Gadgets? Keep it fun in the comments!