I was on vacation last week and intentionally shut off work, tweeting and blogging to relax for a bit.
I did watch the headlines and tracked the story about CrunchFund (wow, sounds yummy), the new VC arm of AOL/TechCrunch, and the resulting controversy over TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s role at the news site (which culminated in him leaving, rather, being forced to leave this week).
There are so many interesting facets to this story. Tons of great articles and posts have been written, and I won’t rehash them here. I will say that I think this points to the growing up of blogging, the issue would not have raised eyebrows several years ago, because blogs were generally not bound by expectations of editorial independence.
In some of the articles I read, people in the tech field did not want to be quoted on record about this because of the power of TechCrunch and Arrington. I do not have anything personal against the guy, and admire what he built; however he was outspoken about PR (among many other things) and often panned PR agencies and their clients by extension (see my post about his rails against press embargoes).
So I found some of his statements defending the move and his intention to try to juggle both roles (VC and editorial) to be ironic, as they sounded like just so much spinning – the following excerpt is from one of the first NY Times articles about the controversy:
“I don’t claim to be a journalist,” Mr. Arrington said, though he breaks news and writes prolifically. “I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure….Friendships and marriage are far more potent than financial conflicts,” he said. “I firmly believe that the reason we are a popular site is because we have built reader trust, and the only way to build reader trust is not to trick them.”
Then the news broke earlier last week that Arrington would in fact be leaving TechCrunch. In what must have been the final insult, he was dispatched with faint praise by a PR spokeswoman (according to an article in this week’s NY Times, see below):
AOL, which will still invest a large part of the CrunchFund’s $20 million, dismissed any question of a dispute between Mr. Arrington and the company. “We love Mike and it was the right, amicable decision that we came to together,” said Maureen Sullivan, a spokeswoman. “We’re super excited about our relationship with him going forward.”
Really? That is pretty rich. I have a hard time envisioning an “amicable decision.” Indeed Michael taunted a bit (from the same article):
But there were signs that the parting of the ways was less than amiable. In a Twitter post Monday, Mr. Arrington taunted Arianna Huffington, who runs the AOL Huffington Post Media Group that includes TechCrunch, writing: “ok @ariannahuff. Let’s go ahead and talk about how this really played out.”
At the conference, Mr. Arrington wore a T-shirt that read “unpaid blogger,” an allusion to an earlier statement by Ms. Huffington that Mr. Arrington must step down as an editor but could remain an unpaid blogger.
Arrington vs. Arianna: Tale of the Tape
