Watching things happen and writing about it IS important. There's no shame in admiring startups but not spinning one up.

Of course, he HAS spun one up. He's got a big blog network in lots of countries, built up Crunchbase with a team of great devs and a reportedly cool API, etc. TechCrunch has tons of custom software. And it's profitable.

Admiring's fine, it's criticizing that I have a problem with. It takes all of half a second to say "Twitter stability sucks," but it takes a LOT more work to actually make a Twitter that is stable. Anyone can say what's wrong with the world.

This sounds to me like you are implying that journalism is a less important profession, since they are only criticizing things and writing about them, and not actually change them directly? Or, I don't get your point... (ok, Arrington is something between journalist and a blogger, but my objection still applies).

Fine. If noone wants to say it, I will.

In my opinion, Journalism is a less important profession. Why? Because it depends on the movers. Arrington's job would not exist if there weren't people out starting companies. Journalism cannot exist in a vacuum.

Also, I would argue that journalism (as we know it) does not create value. Rather, it is an arbitrageur of information.

I disagree.

Journalism fuels newspapers. And newspapers/blog in themselves are essential. Without Techcrunch or ArsTechnica, you might have not been aware of "startups" at all. You wouldn't know about startup failures or successes, and might have less motivation to build a startup. Also, there comes a time where you were looking for employees and those are the only destinations where you could get the word out.

I have a friend that says that small towns have a symbiotic relationships with their local newspapers. With those, people cannot know what's going on in the community, they wouldn't be able to post small ads, economy would slow down by lack of information.

So yes, journalism might appear as "easy" but they are the blood of society.

That wasn't the point. The original question was whether the journalism industry is less valuable than other industries. And I said yes because they aren't first movers; they are reactionary.

Sending a PR release to Ars is valuable but it's not like you wouldn't have a business if it didn't exist. They may enhance value, but they certainly don't create any on their own.

I have a friend that says that small towns have a symbiotic relationships with their local newspapers.

Absolutely. Newspapers are helpful in society. But the example you use just has the paper as a medium of information exchange. The front of a church door served the same purpose a couple centuries ago. As information becomes more fluid through other technologies, the newspaper will fall into irrelevance.

Agreed. Journalism in the Watergate sense is extremely important. "Journalism" in the "I blog about Twitter" sense is basically worthless.

Criticizing, too, is important. Without it, Twitter's stability would never improve. Hell, even with it, it seems unlikely to happen.

Arrington reminds me a lot of the character of Anton Ego in Ratatouille. A vicious critic. This speech (by Ego) in particular comes to mind:

[POTENTIAL SPOILER WARNING]

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends."

Who cares? Do you think people writing about Twitter sucking actually makes them improve things? If this were so, then automated phone response systems would be history. So would off-shore call centers, and so on.

Bad Twitter stability will get fixed if and when it translates into lost revenue and/or market share. From what I have been reading, it already is (apparently to FriendFeed if I remember correctly. I am not at all into the Twitter thing, so please correct me if I'm wrong).

These are businesses. Profits, market share, revenues, that kind of thing matters. Everything else matters only when it translates into something that matters.