TechCrunch states its side of the fight in the Blognation situation
By Sean P. Aune
Following up from yesterday’s post, TechCrunch has stated its side of the story in the ongoing war of words with Sam Sethi of Blognation.
In what can only be categorized as a blogger version of the movie, War of the Roses, TechCrunch, via their CrunchNotes domain, have tried to fill in its side of the story in regards to Sam Sethi’s allegations.
As the response from TechCrunch carries no authorship by-line, one can only assume it was written by Michael Arrington, the owner of TechCrunch. He refers to “me” several times in response to what Mr. Sethi alleged, but you can’t be sure that he is the author.
He attempts to clear the air about Mr. Sethi’s departure from TechCrunch UK, and also tries to let it be known that his former employee has a track record of issuing death threats against those who do not do as he says. As for the fabled venture capitalist term sheet that seems to be the supposed impetus for the closing of Blognation, Mr. Arrington only says he got it from an anonymous source, but does not address the ethics behind his release of it.
In the end, it seems that the two sides are so wildly separate in their version of the facts that you can only sit down and try to figure out for yourself what exactly happened. What seemed to be a story in the beginning has turned in to a case of “he said/he said”, with no real clue as to which side is being completely forthright with the facts.
As was said yesterday, this entire situation leads one to wonder what code of conduct the blogosphere operates under. Are we journalists? Are we some entirely new creature that no one is 100% certain how we operate?
It saddens this writer to see such a situation spilled out in front of the public because it’s like that old saying that you don’t want to know where your food comes from, but in this case, you don’t want to know how your favorite blogs are produced.
This is a story that is sure to play out for quite some time to come, and one can only hope it does not sully the entire tech blog world in the eyes of our readers.
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December 14th, 2007
>one can only hope it does not sully the entire tech blog world in the eyes of our readers.
Too late for that my friend, too late for that.
December 14th, 2007
Ahem, fyi, crunchnotes is mike’s personal blog. Nobody else writes there :-)
December 14th, 2007
This is a clear case of Arrington knowing what he was doing. This is what happened. Seth was a jerk who didn’t get along with Mike (or the other way around) then screwed over the founder of blognation Lee Wilkins. Sam then tried to take the idea of blognation from Lee and run it himself. That’s it.
Seth’s a fool; Arrington makes excuses for the fact that he wanted Seth to fail and used all his power to ’step on seth’. Seth’s incompetence and Mike’s wrath caused this to fail.
Seth is to blame he failed and Arrington help him get there.
Both are jerks. Will the blogosphere produce some class acts please.