Goodbye Erick, Hello Eric
TechCrunch has been through a lot lately, and we need to focus on what truly matters: covering startups and innovation. So, this post is going to be short. — But here is what's going on: Erick Schonfeld is leaving and Eric Eldon is replacing him as editor.
Context & Ripple Effects
Erick Schonfeld has run TechCrunch's newsroom since Michael Arrington brought him in as co-editor in September 2007 (his arrival as co-editor was itself front-page news at the time), and he steered the site through the Disrupt conference era and the transition under parent AOL. His exit closes the founder-era chapter: Arrington himself had already been written off the masthead years earlier (when the founder shared his pulpit), and January 2012's adoption of strict new conflicts-of-interest policies signaled the newsroom was being formalized.
The story traveled fast — PandoDaily, Business Insider, VentureBeat and AllThingsD all picked it up within a day — and AllThingsD framed it inside a wider wave of AOL departures the same week, with CTO Alex Gounares leaving and Huffington Post tech head Tim Dierks out after five months. The editor change reads less like an isolated hire and more like one node in AOL-wide churn.
First-order effects
- Eric Eldon takes immediate editorial control of TechCrunch, inheriting a newsroom that just adopted strict conflicts-of-interest rules in January 2012 — his first job is enforcing the reset his predecessor announced.
- Schonfeld exits a chair he held for over four years, leaving mid-cycle ahead of the spring Disrupt events he helped program, including on-stage interviews like his 2011 New York sit-down with Fred Wilson.
Second-order effects
- Rival startups-and-funding outlets — PandoDaily most visibly — now compete against a TechCrunch under new editorial leadership, and their same-day coverage shows how closely each edit at TechCrunch is watched for weakness or drift.
- AOL is simultaneously losing its CTO (Alex Gounares) and a five-month HuffPost tech chief (Tim Dierks, per AllThingsD), so the new TechCrunch editor reports into a corporate parent whose own structure is in flux.
Third-order effects
- The swap extends a structural pattern in tech blogging: personality-driven founder-era editors giving way to career newsroom operators as independent blogs are absorbed into corporate media groups, with editorial policy (like the conflicts rules) replacing founder discretion as the governance mechanism.
- If AOL's parallel executive turnover continues, TechCrunch's editorial independence becomes the open question its peers will keep probing — the site's credibility now rests on whether the new policies hold under corporate pressure.
The trend: Founder-era tech blog editors are being replaced by career newsroom hands as sites like TechCrunch are institutionalized inside corporate parents such as AOL.