51–60 of 118 posts
This whole saga is nothing short of confusing. I guess the owners of TC lost sight of the picture when they saw a nice financial exit. They've covered AOL long enough to know how bad things might get. What's really interesting is how AOL managed stay alive all these years and even acquire properties with life in them.
selling overpriced dialup to old and ignorant people
(not a joke)
So presumably this includes the possibility of writing 100% positive articles on CrunchFund funded companies and 100% negative articles on their competitors....
NBC is owned by GE, that doesn't restrict NBC Nightly News from reporting on the weapons made by GE that were used by and against Libyan rebels. I understand the levels of separation are a lot deeper with GE/NBC, but as long as full disclosure is given about his relationship with Crunchfund companies I don't see a huge ethical problem. That said, I really don't see why Arrington would want to try wearing both hats. I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would become a lot more suspicious of this being a pageview drive if Arriana replied using huffingtonpost.com
It's obviously not a pageview drive... This is making AOL look really bad, so if it's a pageview drive AOL is stupid. Especially because of the post MG wrote last night which sounded very honest and blunt.
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I don't read TC regularly, but do they disclose when an article is written by someone who has a financial stake in the company being written about?
I side with Arrington too, AOL didn't stick to their promise and Huff Post is hardly editorial brilliance. They don't pay most of their staff and a lot of their content is just SEO spam. I mean all of these editors of Engadget left, keeping quiet but many hinted about the editorial aspects inside of AOL as one of the reasons they'd resigned.
I briefly worked for AOL on the Winamp team right after they acquired both Winamp and Time Warner. The story that an AOL deal ends up in a total cluster fuck is 10 years old. With any knowledge of recent history, it is boggling anyone thought this acquisition would work and I don't believe for a second Arrington is writing in earnest.
Reddit would be an anomaly, I'm happy to say, although it still has a ways to grow out of its niche.
Techcrunch is an interesting read now and then and certainly draws people that love what they do and others that don't. Lots of trolls anytime Steve Gilmour or MG Siegler post, it is the nature of the Web.
This very much seems like a spat between Arriana Huffington and Michael Arrington, both of which have very public forums to address their sides. At the end of the day, if the paperwork signed says that TC was to have "editorial independence" from Huffington Post, then AOL needs to address that. If it doesn't, then the parties involved need to figure out how to salve the assorted egos.
The CrunchFund thing? I get the impression that Armstrong and Arrington get along and Armstrong/AOL see the Crunchfund as a way of getting AOL (event at a distance) more involved in developing new companies. Does it make things more complicated? Probably.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
NBC is owned by GE, that doesn't restrict NBC Nightly News from reporting on the weapons made by GE that were used by and against Libyan rebels. I understand the levels of separation are a lot deeper with GE/NBC, but as long as full disclosure is given about his relationship with Crunchfund companies I don't see a huge ethical problem. That said, I really don't see why Arrington would want to try wearing both hats. I…
I bet NBC Nightly News has a fairly rigorous and well-defined code of ethics.
A set of "rules" that sounds good to outsiders but lets insiders do what they want.
Most "code of ethics" make it easy for insiders to call outsiders "unethical" for doing things that insiders do.
For example, "journalists" are allowed to make up quotes. Outsiders aren't.