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If You’re Arrington The Rules Do Not Apply to You

If You’re Arrington The Rules Do Not Apply to You

Michael Arrington Bastard of the BlogsMichael Arrington, founder of Techcrunch, is a known preacher of ethics and disclosure and has hit out regularly at the MSM. Techcrunch has often been criticized to only promote startups who pay to be featured but so far none of these claims checked out according to former Valleywag contributor Paul Boutin.

Last night Arrington reported the upcoming sale of MCHammer’s DanceJam. So far, nothing special, just another acquisition of an online website which was reported by Techcrunch. Another day and people are still dying of starvation and crime. Life goes on.

But there’s one small detail about this news: Arrington is investor in DanceJam. The investment was disclosed in the post, with a small pinch of *whine* as he announced that the company had not announced the sale to him nor did respond to his email request.

Arrington cashes in as early, angel, investor, but things become really interesting when looking at a long post about ethics and disclosure, written by Arrington more than half a year ago: The Rules Apply To Everyone. In the post the former lawyer went as far as saying that Dave Winer’s credibility was shot because he didn’t disclose a sponsored placement in a feed reader:

But it turns out Winer has a shady past when it comes to disclosing his own conflicts of interest. After his post yesterday, an ex-employee of his noted that Winer took at least one cash payment of $10,000 to promote a blog in a news aggregator he created. This wasn’t disclosed until the the person who paid blogged about it some time later.

Credibility = Shot. Permanently.

Arrington, who has previously admitted that he will promote his friends’ startups on Techcrunch is a guy who balances between two worlds: the world of ethical bloggers and the world of journalistic methods, when the latter is the better strategy to defend his case as we learned from Twittergate earlier this year.

And the DanceJam case is no exception to Arrington’s double standards. The tech blogger has done everything he always claims important by disclosing his conflict of interest, his investment in the company. But what he did forget was to stick to his own words, keep a promise he made more than half a year ago to get rid of the interest of conflicts by ditching his investments:

Back to transparency, one change I’m going to make at TechCrunch is to get rid of all of our investment conflicts. I’ve long been an angel investor and have continued to make a very few investments even after starting TechCrunch. These investments are always disclosed and in my opinion we do more than enough to maintain transparency there. But it’s also a weak point that competitors and disgruntled entrepreneurs use to attack our credibility. So over the next few months I’m going to divest myself of all of those investments in an orderly fashion, and I’ll update readers on the progress. I’ll also discontinue making any further investments.

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quillbot paraphrase tool

As far as we know Arrington still is investor in Seesmic and has not gotten rid of any investment yet. This is where we can take the freedom to paraphrase Arrington’s paragraph about Dave Winer:

This is where the Spitzer phenomenon comes in. Arrington doesn’t see his breaking of a promise as an issue, disclosing his investment in DanceJam. Sorry Michael, but you aren’t above the ethical rules you so keenly shout about.

Credibility = Shot. Permanently.

Lesson learned: If you’re Arrington the rules don’t apply to you.

View Comments (2)
  • you realize that you simply can not sell stock in private companies in the same way you can divest from public companies? isn’t the sale of Dancejam actually in compliance with his previous policy statement?

    complete hatchet job with the post

  • I think selling stock in a private company is a lot harder to do, but it is possible (example Facebook).

    However you’ll have to consult a lawyer regarding the rules on that (as I am not an expert–any outside help appreciated here!).

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