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You're not being entirely fair to AOL here: Arrington could have just said "no way" to the whole CrunchFund thing and posted a TechCrunch rant if it did go thro
by JoachimSchipper 15y ago
You're not being entirely fair to AOL here: Arrington could have just said "no way" to the whole CrunchFund thing and posted a TechCrunch rant if it did go through. That would have made it much harder to sustain accusations of a conflict of interest (the critics are certainly less noisy about TechCrunch's coverage of AOL these days, although that's obviously a no-no according to classical journalist ethics.)
AOL is in no way perfect, but let's not place all the blame on them.
- vessenes 15y agoI think the fundamental issue is that the powers-that-be at AOL that helped bring the fund into existence wanted to do it IN ORDER TO leverage the TechCrunch name. AOL didn't know that, and apparently either didn't care or wished for a conflict of interest. Arrington knew there would be no conflict of interest from his own actions, but has stayed 'blind' to this conflict in approach from his major LP. For whatever reason, he went ahead with this plan, causing significant agitation at TC, and also indicating to the TC staff how much influence AOL has right now; on paper maybe not so much; with only a few 10s of millions of dollars, though, they can rule Michael's roost. This isn't going to finish well, but I think we all knew that.
- dredmorbius 15y agoThere's no need to be fair to AoL. Its record speaks for itself.