Updated 4:14 p.m. ET, Monday, Sept. 12
TechCrunch’s founder and editor Michael Arrington is no longer with the blog, corporate parent AOL finally confirmed Monday in a statement.
The news comes in the wake of a Sept. 7 Fortune magazine report that AOL had made up its mind to fire Arrington, who, along with several other TechCrunch writers had spent several days publicly dueling about his and the site’s status with AOL’s corporate leadership – namely, CEO Tim Armstrong and AOL’s Editor-In-Chief Arianna Huffington.
Full disclosure: I was a staff blogger at AOL News from January 2010 to November 2010.
The statement, which was posted to TechCrunch, reads:
“The TechCrunch acquisition has been a success for AOL and for our shareholders, and we are very excited about its future.
Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund.
Michael is a world-class entrepreneur and we look forward to supporting his new endeavor through our investment in his venture fund.
Erick Schonfeld has been named the editor of TechCrunch. TechCrunch will be expanding its editorial leadership in the coming months.”
TechCrunch Columnist Paul Carr said last week that if Arrington left and weren’t allowed to choose his successor, he would also resign from the site. On Monday, he tweeted: “I would need 1000 tweets to unpack the bullshit from that statement.”
As All Things D’s Kara Swisher notes, AOL will curiously continue to be the lead investor in Arrington’s $20 million startup venture capital fund, the CrunchFund, which, announced on Sept. 1, was the catalyst for the ensuing corporate clusterf*** that lead to his ouster.
Swisher also adds: “Oddly, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong buried the news in his weekly internal memo to staff.” Head over to All Things D to read the whole, lengthy, choppy, corporate jargon-filled memo in its entirety.
Arrington didn’t have any initial reaction to the news, at least not via his public Twitter feed, from which he’s commented numerous times throughout the nearly two-week-long ordeal. But he’s currently speaking about entirely unrelated matters at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. Watch live here.
Late update: The Business Insider reports that Arrington made the news official at TechCrunch Disrupt, saying “It’s no longer a good situation for me to stay at TechCrunch. Effective in a couple of days, I won’t be an employee of TechCrunch or AOL. I will continue to run the Crunchfund and AOL will remain a partner in CrunchFund. I will continue to support this conference and TechCrunch over time.”
He also donned a T-shirt with the words “unpaid blogger,” a joke at the expense of Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post, famous for its legions of unpaid bloggers. Huffington had previously suggested Arrington could continue to post at TechCrunch as an unpaid contributor.
Late late update: TechCrunch’s new editor Erick Schonfeld tweeted “Honored and humbled to be taking the full reins at Techcrunch.”
Another late update: Arianna Huffington takes to her own website with a blistering post in which she confirms that “the TechCrunch editorial dispute has been resolved,” and then proceeds to skewer The Wall Street Journal for a Sept. 10 story on the apparent culture clash within AOL. Arianna writes:
“The issue at hand wasn’t about personalities. It was about principle; a very simple fundamental principle about conflicts of interest that every journalistic enterprise adheres to — including the Wall Street Journal, as its former publisher L. Gordon Crovitz points out today. But you wouldn’t know that from the breathless opening grafs of the exceptionally misinformed, substance-lite, and anonymous-quote-riddled piece…”
“There is one upside to this shoddy journalism: the reporters got the story so wrong, at least we know they aren’t hacking into our phones.”
That contrasts with what Gawker reported, quoting an anonymous former editor of Huffington’s, who said that “She has a long record of closing her eyes to conflicts of interest. Applying it in the case of Arrington is merely a cover for some other undisclosed and undoubtedly more petty reason.”
Even later update: Arrington, apparently unimpressed with Huffington’s post, publicly tweets at Huffington: “ok @ariannahuff. Let’s go ahead and talk about how this really played out.” She has yet to respond but we’ll update when she does.
