Welcome Erick Schonfeld, My New Co-Editor
I was dying to announce this at TechCrunch40, but the timing just didn't work out. Nevertheless, I am extremely proud to announce that TechCrunch now has a co-editor. Erick Schonfeld, most recently an editor-at-large at Business 2.0 …
Context & Ripple Effects
The hire lands two weeks after Business 2.0 confirmed it was shutting down, a Time Inc. technology magazine felled by a fading advertising market — a survival threat first flagged as a rumor back in July 2007. Schonfeld was its editor-at-large, so this is displaced print talent landing at the fastest-growing blog on the beat.
For Michael Arrington, the timing is deliberate: TechCrunch has just spent the week live-blogging every session of its own TechCrunch40 conference, an operation now big enough that a solo founder-editor is a bottleneck. Adding a co-editor from a legacy masthead signals the site is building an editorial bench, not just scaling traffic.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch gets a second senior editor starting Wednesday, splitting the editing load between Arrington and Schonfeld while the site's own conference is still generating daily coverage.
- Time Inc.'s closure of Business 2.0 loses one of its most visible bylines to a competitor format, converting a shutdown into a direct talent transfer to a rival publication.
Second-order effects
- Other print technology titles facing the same ad downturn — the dynamic that killed Business 2.0 — now have a proven exit path: their editors can move to blogs without leaving the beat.
- Rival blogs get a staffing benchmark to match; a co-edited TechCrunch raises the bar for how much editorial output readers expect from a startup-coverage site.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — magazines contracting under declining print advertising while blogs absorb their staff — tech journalism's center of gravity shifts structurally from mastheads to founder-led sites, with hiring rather than circulation deciding who owns the conversation.
The trend: Print technology journalism's talent pool is draining toward blogs, with shuttered magazines like Business 2.0 becoming recruiting grounds for founder-led publications such as TechCrunch.