The messy public saga embroiling AOL’s fiesty gadget blog Tech Crunch – “CrunchGate,” as one of the blog’s less subtle commenters put it – has now been going on for almost a week straight, with no clear resolution in sight.
It’s still unclear just what is going to happen with TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington, who on Tuesday declared “editorial independence,” from AOL and its head of content, Arianna Huffington. Arrington demanded that AOL remove TechCrunch from under Huffington’s control, sell it back to its original shareholders or, if neither option was acceptable, he would walk.
Full Disclosure: I was a staff blogger at AOL in the pre-Huffington Post days of January 2010 to November 2010.
But the latest report, via Fortune‘s Dan Primark, suggests that AOL has made up its mind to fire Arrington for good, although the company and Arrington have yet to confirm it at the time of this posting.
Shortly after that story was posted, Arrington tweeted “My life feels very strange to me,” (Evoking a Doors lyric.)
The turn of events has been made all the more confusing by AOL’s initial statements that Arrington would be staying on in some lesser capacity at TechCrunch, followed by Huffington’s assertion that he was already gone.
What is clear is if Arrington goes, some of the TechCrunch staff is going with him.
On Thursday, TechCrunch writer Paul Carr announced his intentions in a post entitled: “Yes, Of Course I’ll Resign Unless Mike Arrington Chooses His Successor.”
As Carr puts it:
Arianna Huffington has made clear that she wants Mike gone and TechCrunch to be assimilated into Huffington Post, under her direct control. That means whoever she might pick as “editor” will be little more than an avatar for her; a cardboard cut-out installed to do her bidding. That’s so ridiculously unacceptable a situation that the idea makes me feel physically sick. It will be the death of TechCrunch and everything we’ve all worked for these past years.
Arrington himself, who has remained relatively inactive since his Tuesday declaration, posted the first comment beneath Carr’s post. “Sigh,” was all he wrote.
Popular TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler on Tuesday suggested that Arrington’s firing would be irreversibly detrimental to the integrity, smooth operations and staff morale of the blog.
And Arrington’s severance is a sharp contrast to the sentiment AOL CEO Tim Armstrong seemed to impart when he proudly announced the CrunchFund, Arrington’s AOL-backed-and-financed venture capital fund, defending potential conflicts-of-interest between TechCrunch’s coverage and the fund’s activities by telling The New York Times: “TechCrunch is a different property and they have different standards.”
Needless to say, those words came back to haunt Armstrong in a very big way.
But Armstrong’s reportedly eyeing a political career anyway, according to Gawker, and may just attempt to wring his hands of the whole mess and hand control of AOL over to Huffington. No word yet on whether Arrington will try to run against him.
TechCrunch was sold to AOL for $30 million in November, the initial step take in the vintage Web company’s effort to reinvent itself. Less than a year later, the experiment appears to be reaching a disastrous conclusion, at least for TechCrunch’s founder. We’ll update when we hear officially from AOL that Arrington has been terminated.
