12.6.06: Arrington: Kingmaker or sleazy journalist?

By Richard Koman - December 6, 2006

The San Francisco Chronicle's Dan Fost profiles TechCrunch's Michael Arrington - on the front page of this morning's paper.

The piece lauds Arrington as "Mr. Web 2.0, a kingmaker among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and a figure of controversy in the media world he is disrupting." But the news hook is Arrington's announcement that he is taking a couple months off to pay attention to the business side of things, away from the constant grind of pimping companies with silly names that barely register on the Valley's radar.

He's making money - he's got half a mil in the bank after 18 months of full-time blogging. But when you're on top you're also assailed from everyone from The New York Times to Nick Denton.

Old-school journalists question Arrington's ethics and potential for conflicts of interest. He even engaged in a high-profile dustup with the New York Times at an Online News Association conference in October in which he accused the Times of ethical lapses but later backed down. Blogger and author Nick Carr charged that while Arrington discloses his investments when he writes about companies, he doesn't always disclose those investments when he writes -- sometimes negatively -- about their competitors. Tech gossip blog Valleywag has a field day with each alleged transgression.

Arrington struck back on his blog, writing that his friendships and his activity as an entrepreneur and investor help him get access to inside information. "No one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free," he wrote. "We aren't. We never have been. We never will be."

So, Fost says, Arrington is something of a microcosm of the turmoil in the media business. The medium of "news" is clearly becoming the Internet. But are things like journalistic "ethics" part of the package? And does the definition of ethical journalism need to change?

Blogs like TechCrunch expose a threat to the vaunted mainstream media. Newspapers have seen their financial base eroding as audiences and advertising dollars rush to the Web. And many bloggers, not steeped in the rules set forth in traditional newsrooms and journalism schools, are grabbing eyeballs -- and ads.
Into this environment walks Arrington, already a made man in the valley by virtue of his time as an attorney at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati, the pre-eminent Silicon Valley law firm, as well as stints at RealNames, a company that died in the dot-com crash, and other smaller entrepreneurial ventures that he led.

He took a year off from work in 2004, living in Southern California with a girlfriend (he is now unattached), surfing and going to movies. He was at a bachelor party in Serbia, of all places, in February 2005, when Keith Teare, his old boss at RealNames, reached him with the idea for a new startup. The company, which eventually was launched in March, is Edgeio, a system for delivering classified ads online. Arrington turned to the Web to research all the new Internet companies that were popping up. He couldn't find a site that covered the scene, so he started TechCrunch in June 2005.

And what about Nick Denton? At Valleywag, Denton is gloating about the a line from Arrington in a sidebar. "Nick Denton is evil." Sez Denton:

Michael Arrington tells the San Francisco Chronicle that his latest hire is a professional writer, who is going to help teach him the craft. Here's another tip: if you're in a good old-fashioned tabloid war, never let them get to you, and never ever let them know they've got to you.


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By Richard Koman - December 6, 2006 | Permalink | Comment | Category: News Watch
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Comments (1)

Tom Foremski [TypeKey Profile Page]:

Excellent advice from Nick Denton. You'll notice he saved it until Michael Arrington had dug himself into a massively deep hole... That's entertainment!

Posted: December 6, 2006 2:40 PM

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