Startup Founder Plays Tech Press Like a Fiddle

theodp writes "Steinar Skipsnes came up with a unique way to get more women into tech. Make them up. Posing as 'Sarah Hanson,' a 19-year-old woman who claimed to have auctioned off 10% of her future income in return for $125,000 to fund her Senior Living Map startup, Skipsnes pitched the story via email to generate press coverage. It worked — VentureBeat, HuffPo, Yahoo!, AOL, GeekWire, and others took the bait. But after doubts were aired about the story, Skipsnes fessed up to concocting the too-good-to-be-true hoax about the female teen entrepreneur to appeal to the interests of the tech press. 'I started to think "what if I took the elements of what the press loves and created a story?"' Skipsnes explained. "So I did.'"

Comments

Obvious

[benjfowler]

Media is a soft option for cultural elites, and for people close to the establishment, who aren't bright enough to do anything harder and more socially useful. A disproportionate number of people who find themselves working in 'media' or as journalists tend to be pampered rich kids who can get in, because they can afford to work for free as interns (mummy and daddy paying the bills), and gives them access to the corridors of power.

Worse yet, the Murdoch press and the tabloids attract cuntish personalities. It's just the nature of the business -- it attracts posh scumbags.

My own family's brushes with the media, has shown them to be consistently egotistical, nasty and clueless.

The flipside of this, is that it isn't hard to manipulate the media if you know what you're doing: people who are exceedingly vain and clueless are putty in the hands of clever and ruthless people.

Why didn't I think of that?

[Velex]

Zomg! Why didn't I think of that. I was taking estrogen when I was 19...

er...

shoot. Apparently you have to be a womyn-born-womyn.