The Big Story This week featured an interesting day for some of the writers at TechCrunch as we embraced the task of simultaneously covering the quarterly earnings report releases from a whole lot of Silicon Valley tech companies. On Thursday, Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Spotify, Twitter and Shopify all released their earnings within the course of a half hour of each other. TechCrunch has a smaller staff of writers than you might think, we all keep an eye on quite a few industries and have plenty of stories in the works at most times. We’re used to being nimble, that being said, we scratched our heads on what to do when a handful of companies we’ve covered closely, some for decades, all gave their quarterly earnings update on the same day. This is all relatively low stakes, we miss an earnings release and the world turns, but internally we’ve been having the broad conversation about what earnings mean to readers. Once an opportunity for tech companies to deliver a window into their business and aspirations, as the biggest tech companies have become the biggest companies period, they’ve largely pivoted from transparency to obfuscation. At their best, a good earnings write-up can offer a window into Wall Street expectations and the trajectory of a company over time. By looking at earnings you can see why certain surprises aren’t all that surprising and you can get a sense for what companies are innovating as opposed to just increasing revenues. Not all venture capitalists love the quarterly earnings release model, with some arguing that it discourages long-term investment for these companies and leaves them too focused on delivering small victories instead of lasting impacts. A bird’s eye view of a half-dozen or so releases landing Thursday only signified how important it is to tap these disclosures for insights into long-term health as we decided what’s worth writing up and what’s worth sticking in the mental filing cabinet. | 
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