Techcrunch Founder Shares His Pulpit
Michael Arrington, founder and (strong) voice of Techcrunch, an influential tech-centric blog about startups, is moving over to share his pulpit. — Willingly. — Starting Wednesday, Techcrunch will be co-edited by Erick Schonfeld …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch has been, until now, a one-man pulpit: Michael Arrington's voice alone drives a blog whose coverage can generate buzz and cash for startups, and whose founder is already stretched across the co-hosted TechCrunch20 symposium with Jason Calacanis and an open rivalry with Om Malik's competing tech blog. Adding Business 2.0's Erick Schonfeld as co-editor, starting Wednesday per Arrington's own announcement, converts a personal blog into something closer to a masthead.
The move lands mid-wave: TechCrunch is a product of the participatory web the Mercury News described in January 2006 as 'a read and write mechanism,' and its founder has been arguing since May that the resulting startup funding frenzy needs a downturn to shake out excesses. Institutionalizing the edit desk is how a solo pundit scales coverage without diluting the brand.
First-order effects
- Erick Schonfeld takes shared control of TechCrunch's editorial line from Wednesday, meaning the blog's influential verdict on startups no longer rests solely on Arrington's voice.
- Arrington frees capacity for his non-blog ventures — the TechCrunch20 conference with Jason Calacanis chief among them — while keeping his name atop the masthead.
Second-order effects
- Om Malik and other rival tech bloggers face a competitor with doubled editing throughput in a market where Arrington has acknowledged they are already too busy to socialize because they compete directly.
- Startups courting coverage now have two editors rather than one gatekeeper to win over, subtly redistributing the buzz-and-cash power the blog wields.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the leading Web 2.0 blogs consolidate from personality-driven sites into staffed newsrooms that compete with legacy tech media on structure as well as speed.
- A multi-editor TechCrunch sets up governance questions — who owns the editorial voice when the founder eventually steps back — that solo blogs never had to answer.
The trend: Personal tech blogs born of the read-and-write web are professionalizing into multi-editor publications, turning individual pundits into media companies.