SAI/former VentureBeat reporter here: it's considered a moderate offense. Could infer to your/our Twitter followers etc. that there was an exchange for positive coverage, which is a pop at our credibility.
Credibility is basically all we have. (However small it is.)
IMO, On the consumer side credibility is not as important in tech journalism when compared to say political reporting. Products get canceled, startups die, so you would have to predict the future to always be relevant. Having connections and finding interesting stories / ideas and knowing how to critique them is more important than knowing the iPad7's release date.
We have all read bad spin, and honestly it quickly becomes noise.
SAI, former VentureBeat reporter here, few observations:
1) What is Buffer? If I don't know what the company does, I'm going to pass it off to the tips folder and it will probably die in obscurity.
2) The "saw the post you wrote yesterday" is not the approach you want. I cover social games — be aware that I cover social games and make it relevant to that. Reading my last three posts is not enough to tailor a pitch, because we write about a lot of things and they aren't all necessarily on our beat.
3) Seriously, introduce yourself. Don't do it with a pitch — let me know who you are and what you do. We do Q&As all the time with companies that have no news. You are 100x more likely to get published if I know who you are, what you do and why what you are doing is important.
4) How does this relate to normals? Most Twitter users don't actually Tweet. This is useful to me, but not necessarily my readers — who are of utmost importance to me.
5) Know the publication you are pitching. Blind pitching everyone is a waste of time — if you are a social game developer, go for Inside Social, GamesBeat, TechCrunch, etc. Fast Company is not going to listen to you.
6) We have to rush through literally hundreds of pitches each day. Just because we phrased something differently than you'd like, if it is still factually accurate, you're going to upset a reporter if you try to nitpick on wording. I once encountered a PR person that was yelling at me because I didn't call an online deals site a "mobile platform" and, instead, an "online deals site."
7) Also, we do want to know what you think. Entrepreneur and founder input is valuable in just about any story. If some big news happens — Steve Jobs resigns, for example — let us know what you think. When Jobs passed away, the first person I heard from was Box.net's Aaron Levie, who told me it was such a gargantuan loss and he was basically his idol and what made him want to become an entrepreneur. That, in of itself, is a story because Levie is running a company with a val of more than $500 million.
8) Don't be afraid to have a personal relationship with reporters — we aren't going to screw you, because blowing a relationship is worthless in this industry.
Was a blast — thought it was a bit weird to see everyone trying to take pictures with the 10.1 tablets. I'm hoping the novelty wears off quickly and tablet photography doesn't become a thing.
I suspect most people aren't using Linux as their primary OS at home. Macs are incredibly popular with programmers, designers, and Internet types, which pretty much encapsulates the HN crowd. In my [CS] department, at least half the students and almost all of the profs use Macs.
I thought it was great that you dropped in on Hacker News — something like this is exactly the kind of low-cost commentary we need from some of the leaders of the valley from time to time.
I feel like there are at least a few disagreements about the state of a tech bubble in the valley. I mean, the poll got a few votes, so it's an issue worth noting — right? Then again, that probably comes from a significant amount of inexperience on my end. But I feel like your opinion is valuable even outside of the subset of the conversation in Hacker News. (Maybe we need a Bolzanno-Weierstrass analogy for discussion within specific venues and the discussion in the valley as a whole.)
I just think something like this is an easy way to get your opinion on the matter without having to get in front of you and waste your time on an issue that isn't exactly pressing. I mean, I don't know how I would feel if reporters hounded me every day asking if I still believed there was a tech bubble. But it's still an issue that obviously a lot of people care about and like to read about.
Anyway, my two cents. But, like I said, I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to this whole "silicon valley" thing.
Enterprise Google mail also appears to be working.