Michael Arrington Wars with AOL, Fired from Editorial Position
Since I wrote that HuffPost was going to doom AOL, the blogosphere has been abuzz with a part of the article that wasn’t supposed to get that much attention. That part of the article was about Michael Arrington calling Huffington herself, “pathetic.” While it wasn’t supposed to be the main part of the article, I have been told that Huffington was quite peeved that it was picked up by Foxnews and used by the right-wing to attack her.
Now from those in the know, it has been revealed that Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch is going to most likely to be fired within the next 48 hours, not only for leaking to journalists his complete distaste for Ms. Huffinton, but for a total disregard for AOL corporate policies and hierarchy.
I am told that AOL corporates were not happy when Arringtons’ revealed the existence of a techfund, headed by Arrington himself. The fund, CrunchFund, was in the planning stages when Arrington, once again leaked its existence before the fund was actually finalized. AOL confirmed the fund publically, while still quite surprised at the announcement. Even worse, Huffington was completely out of the loop, not even aware that Arrington was talking about such a fund.
Huffington is rumored to have called AOL CEO Tim Armstrong immediately and demanded that Arrington be fired from the company, and her be given complete editorial control. Armstrong confirmed with Huffington that she already had complete control of the editorial side and in response, Arrington was not-so-secretly fired from TechCrunch.
The editorial staff at TechCrunch, who are known to be completely loyal to Arrington, did not take this sitting down and responded with posting an article on TechCrunch, claiming that “as soon as tomorrow, Mike may be thrown out of the company he founded. Or he may not. No one knows. And if he is, he will be replaced by — well, again, no one knows. No one knows much of anything.”
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