Michael Arrington Launches New Blog
Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder and wearer of acerbic T-shirts, has resurfaced with a new blog, promising ‘transparency’ and ‘truth.’
Arrington was banished as co-editor of TechCrunch last month, after new owner AOL decided he had a conflict of interest as a TechCrunch editor and owner of a new $20 million investment venture, the CrunchFund.
Arrington’s new blog, Uncrunched, launched on Friday with a single post titled, ‘Here I Am.’ Those three words were the entire post, though that didn’t stop users logging over 500 comments. Comfortingly, this was the first of those.
By Sunday, Arrington had found the Upload/Insert window in WordPress and wrote a far more substantial post titled, ‘What Exactly Am I Doing Here At Uncrunched?‘ Spoiler: he’s there so he can write what the hell he likes:
“One thing I knew for sure was that I’d never trick readers, or lie to them, or otherwise be shady. It’s not me. And even if it was me, it’s too easy to get caught. The easy path was the one where transparency was shining brightly. That was never enough to stop the journalism community’s antibodies from hitting TechCrunch hard over all the conflicts of interest that were inherently part of who I am. We fought through all that for years, and I kept fighting until my pen was removed from my hand, so to speak, by AOL a couple of weeks ago. Now I’ve got a new pen, though. And a blank slate. Infinite choices, I get to choose my own path. All that jazz.”
Arrington hasn’t held back on his dispute with AOL, which acquired TechCrunch for $25 million in September 2010. He’s been particularly vocal about his run-ins with Arianna Huffington, the president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.
He appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt a fortnight ago sporting the “Unpaid Blogger” shirt you see above – a shot at the role he was limited to at TechCrunch after he was ousted – and was never short of a sarcastic comment over his dealings with AOL and Huffington.
Then, of course, there’s the name of his new internet den: ‘Uncrunched’ suggests Arrington isn’t ready to let bygones be bygones.
