The Tech Press: Screw Them All
Last week I wrote a post about my current investment policy at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I've said many times, is transparency. To that end we will (as we always have) …
Context & Ripple Effects
Michael Arrington has run TechCrunch as a hybrid of newsroom and personal venture portfolio since at least 2007, when the New York Times' Bits blog examined how he shared a pulpit with the startups he covered — a tension the site's own defense of flawed citizen journalism had already framed as an accepted trade-off. The immediate trigger this week was the April Ask a VC episode with Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, where TechCrunch itself raised the awkward case of a VC investing in competitors to his own portfolio companies.
With 'The Tech Press: Screw Them All,' Arrington stops treating the conflict as something to manage quietly and instead discloses his existing financial entanglements openly while restating the site's investment policy. His stated position — that transparency to readers, not recusal, is the primary duty — turns what rivals treat as an ethics scandal into an explicit editorial doctrine.
First-order effects
- TechCrunch readers can now see which of the editor's financial conflicts are already known, making coverage of funded startups legible in a way it previously wasn't.
- VCs who appear on TechCrunch properties, Sabet among them, are now covered by a disclosed-conflict regime rather than an implicit separation between the site's coverage and its editor's checkbook.
Second-order effects
- Competing tech outlets face pressure to match the disclosure standard or explain why they won't, since the argument reframes silence about conflicts as the real ethical failure rather than having them.
- Sources and PR teams gain leverage: knowing an editor holds positions in adjacent companies lets founders price that bias into how they pitch, negotiate embargoes, or route exclusives elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If the disclosure-over-recusal model holds, founder-run tech media consolidates around a structure where ownership stakes and coverage authority sit in the same hands, policed only by published conflict lists rather than newsroom firewalls.
- That normalization invites the question regulators and readers eventually ask of any influential publisher — whether self-disclosure suffices when the discloser sets his own rules — a tension the industry has not yet resolved.
The trend: Tech media is drifting from independence-by-firewall toward independence-by-disclosure, with founder-editors converting conflicts of interest into publicly declared policy.