Bear with me as when I'm tired and have had a long day, I tend to be verbose. This is one of those times :-)

I've attempted not to visited TechCrunch since the the spring of 2007. The times I have were unintentional visits because I had followed a hyperlink without looking at the target site's domain in the status bar. This happens a few times a month at most. So I think it would be better to answer your question in the context of back when I was a reader of TechCrunch. Did I learn more about startups from TechCrunch than the NYT? Absolutely, I did learn quite a bit. However, I spent an obscene amount of time processing all the information that was coming through looking for stuff that was actually worth investigating.

This work is a worthy trade-off for you. The name of your game is identifying and quantifying value, preferably before anyone else even is aware of the opportunity's existence. A mining company needs to invest great resources in processing dull, repetitive, low signal-to-noise-ratio geological information in order to find gold. Well, reading TC is the equivalent task for VCs.

One has to question why the rest of us, hackers mostly, care about this "geological information". We hackers are essentially just miners. Some of us are better than others at extracting the gold from the mine we work in. The few of us that work in our own startups might want to be aware of competing neighbouring mines, having opened up our own, surely.

But otherwise, what necessitates the speculative, dramatic sort of reporting that TC has popularized? Having grown up in the 1990s, I remember a time when common people -- my teachers, friends' parents, etc. -- listened for any hint of geological information coming from a mining company called Bre-X. I distinctly remember exciting, daily reporting on the subject from all the mainstream papers and television networks (the web was a toddler back then). Bre-X had apparently found a huge gold deposit. Soon, regular people were experts at interpreting geological reports, and the media was feeding this frenzy by reporting any piece of speculation they could, as fast as they could.

I'm sure there are a few Canadians around here that can chime in on just what happened to Bre-X. The Wikipedia article does not even come close to explaining how much a part of popular culture it was for a good year or two. But essentially, the speculation fed itself and the scene became more about the speculative information than the gold that was supposed to be back at the mine; gold that ultimately was not there.

I fear that TC is caught up in this same game. Take away the speculation and there's little gold. You could kill the news.ycombinator.com and paulgraham.com websites tomorrow and people could say "Well, they had a good run. They helped spawn Reddit, Justin.TV, Dropbox, Scribd, etc." I could be wrong -- my ignorance due to avoiding TC the past couple of years may be apparent here -- but what are the startups that people will associate with TC having popularized? I can't think of a single one. But not even having read TC the past couple of years, I know a few myths that they have helped to popularize and dramas that they created.

So is there a better source of information about startups? I'd argue that what TC does well is let us know about the existence of a startup. There, it really is the best source of information. But once that startup is on your radar, going straight to the startups themselves is a pretty good source of information. Most are run in a fairly open manner, with the founders offering candid looks into their operations if you're kind enough to ask and seem genuinely interested. A lot have blogs where they answer your questions before you need to ask. Plus, people seem to enjoy connecting with other like-minded individuals and sharing their growing pains, proud achievements, and listening to advice (and taking it with a grain of salt of course!).

I suppose if everybody adopts this strategy, it would fail as it simply does not scale. So I take back what I said. Everybody else, ahem, get all your information from TC ;)