+1 Sending a journo an email is hardly an innovative trick. All online journalists have a minimum number of articles they have to publish per day mandated to them, so are quite happy to receive unsolicited suggestions to meet their quotas.

The 'trick' wasn't so much in emailing TechCrunch, as it was creating a separate website altogether (BetaList) and emailing them about that instead. And then leveraging the publicity that platform is getting through TechCrunch to get publicity for the startup (Openmargin) I was trying to promote in the first place.

Ah! I think this gets lost somewhere in the telling of the story.

I'll probably read that one too