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(comment deleted)
We have our playbook. What we do is focus on what we do best: take years of experience, a professional approach...

How sweet. Sniff, sniff, /me takes out a handkerchief. How about a little story from the other side of the fence?

Say your company is about to get acquired. You get an email from Om Malik himself asking for coverage. The acquiring company's PR person denies him the exclusivity and any details not covered by an official PR. On the day of acquisition the news appears on GigaOm featuring a link to some obscure blog that thrashes the technology, drags company name through dirt and implies that the founders are sneaky bastards. All based on a handful of "facts" that not only were not based on any research, but were merely conjured from a thin air. Asking this blogger for clarification yields some blabbering gibberish clearly showing he had no idea what he was writing about. GigaOm sits quietly in the corner and enjoys the moment.

So please spare me the bullshit about the "professional approach" and what not.

If you have accusations to make, please provide verifiable facts. Otherwise, these insinuations aren't any classier than what you claim to be denouncing.
Take it as an anecdote.
It's not even an anecdote, it's a hypothetical.
If you aren't willing to link to the pages in question I don't believe you.
I find Alexa stats sad. Om could add the Alexa toolbar today and rocket up that chart.
It would be interesting to see the ComScore data for this.
The challenge of a lower-traffic, higher quality model is that you really have to produce coverage that's credible and valuable to industry insiders.

I can't speak for the other properties, but GigaOm seems to be making a serious investment in NewTeeVee, the site most relevant to my company. They hired one of the smartest, hardest working reporters in the space to run the blog, and the conference in November was a higher quality event than in years past.

I'm interested to see how the business evolves over the next year or so.