In a review of TechCrunch’s recent “snarky” remarks about the marketing behind the new movie, Source Code, which permired this past week at SxSW, Sady Doyle of the Guardian has a few things to say about how “bloggers must be free to call a buzzwordgasm a buzzwordgasm:”

Reader, prepare yourself: Someone on the internet thinks Source Code looks silly. Source Code, of course, is a movie that premiered at South by Southwest last weekend, and which stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a man who must relive a train wreck over and over again, in the hope of changing its outcome…

Consider Alexia Tsotis, a TechCrunch blogger called upon to cover the movie’s premiere. Her piece focused on the movie’s marketing, described as a “cross-platform, trans-media campaign” involving “social media game play”. This amounts to asking people to promote the movie on Facebook; Tsotis noted that, and joked about it, calling the above-quoted hype a “buzzwordgasm”. At which point, the trans-media cross-platform marketers at Summit found a whole new use for the internet: contacting AOL, the company that owns TechCrunch, to suggest that Tsotis change her piece.

…it’s also true that bloggers are frequently called upon to cover extremely silly and inconsequential things. To discuss the bold new marketing innovation of “making people talk about a movie on Facebook” with a straight face, especially when that movie is a Groundhog Day remake with slightly more train explosions, is a bit too much to ask for. Without at least some acknowledgment of the ridiculousness at hand, the writer risks turning in an article that is little more than a press release. Without snark, Tsotis’s piece wouldn’t be cruel. It would be something even worse: boring.

Alexia Tsotis’ article on TechCrunch created a a lot of controversy about its review approach, targeting the marketing instead of the movie itself, which appears to be more exciting than the movie itself. Read more…