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Tag: MG Siegler

  • Michael Arrington, MG Siegler Out at PandoDaily

    Out of the AOL / TechCrunch drama factory came PandoDaily earlier this year. The news site launched as one focused on startups and it looked a lot like “TechCrunch All-Stars.”.

    Part of the plan was to have TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington as well as fellow CrunchFund partner and current (sometimes) writer for TechCrunch MG Siegler jump (and stay) on as contributors – a plan that apparently went awry on Monday. According to a post on PandoDaily by Founder and CEO Sarah Lacy, Arrington and Siegler are out at the new site after shareholders voted to yank Arrington as a director.

    As of Monday, April 9 the shareholders of PandoMedia voted to remove Michael Arrington as a director. Given the change in relationship we feel it’s inappropriate for CrunchFund’s partners Michael Arrington and MG Siegler to continue contributing to PandoDaily. We thank MG for his many stellar contributions to date and Michael for his support in the early days of the company.

    The announcement was abbreviated and they disabled comments on the post. There hasn’t been anything more from PandoDaily’s end on the matter.

    But Arrington and Siegler both posted about the move, and they seem to agree on a root cause: their participation in TechCrunch Disrupt.

    Here’s what Arrington had to say on Uncrunched:

    This wasn’t a complete surprise to me, the company notified me last week that they weren’t happy that I and MG Siegler (my partner at CrunchFund) were going to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming May.

    Part of the reason that I’m speaking at Disrupt is that I have a contractual commitment to do so as part of my break with them last year, which Sarah knew about before our involvement in Pando. But MG and I are also speaking there because we still love TechCrunch. And we both speak at many other conferences as well.

    Siegler echoed this on his blog:

    Lots of questions about the PandoDaily situation. To be completely honest, I’m a bit surprised by how this went down. I think Michael’s response is appropriate.

    The problem seemed to be us participating in TechCrunch Disrupt (and I assume more Michael than myself since I’m still a TechCrunch contributor). But we both speak at a lot of conferences. And I view it as valuable that we speak at a wide range of conferences.

    Both Arrington and Siegler also mention that they think PandoDaily has potential to succeed, even though neither will be a part of it. At this point, nobody seems to be shocked by any drama that comes out of this bunch:

    @nikcub
    nik cubrilovic    This whole Techcrunch/Pando/Arrington thing needs an infographic 11 hours ago via web ·  Reply ·  Retweet ·  Favorite · powered by @socialditto

  • PandoDaily: New Tech News Site From TechCrunch All Stars

    The “four biggest voices” who left TechCrunch (Sarah Lacy’s words) have started PandoDaily, a new tech site aimed at covering start-ups that sounds, well, exactly like TechCrunch.

    Lacy is leading the charge, and the site will also feature writing from Michael Arrington, MG Siegler and Paul Carr.

    In a post by Lacy, called “Why I Started PandoDaily,” Lacy says:

    We have one goal here at PandoDaily: To be the site-of-record for that startup root-system and everything that springs up from it, cycle-after-cycle. That sounds simple but it’ll be incredibly hard to pull off. It’s not something we accomplish on day one or even day 300. It’s something we accomplish by waking up every single day and writing the best stuff we can, and continually adding like-minded staffers who have the passion, drive and talent to do the same.

    As a founder, I have a personal goal that’s just as important and just as core to our culture: I do not want to sell this company. I have opened nearly every meeting by telling potential investors and potential employees this, so I guess readers should know it from the beginning as well.

    Of course, there’s the caveat that if someone calls me tomorrow and offers $1 billion, I might cave. I do have investors after all, and everyone has a price. And I’ve been around enough entrepreneurs to know the journey changes you in ways you can’t expect. I’m as aware as anyone this resolve might soften over time.

    Arrington adds on his Uncrunched blog:

    Pando Daily has a single overriding goal – to be the paper of record for Silicon Valley. That means every story of importance will be covered with an unbiased look at the facts. Along with a healthy dose of the analysis that you’ve already come to expect from her and the people she works with.

    There’s a big void in Silicon Valley right now, and I believe readers are aching for something to fill that void. Pando Daily is going to do that.

    Speaking about TechCrunch in a video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, Lacy said, “I think it’s on a downward path obviously or would have stayed. They’re not breaking news as much as they used to be…”

    It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how the new site competes with the established TechCrunch, which does still retain some of its writers from the pre-AOL days.

    They’re also going to have a monthly series of events (with fireside chats).

    Arrington’s CrunchFund, by the way, is also an investor in PandoDaily. Other investors include: Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih, Zach Nelson, Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, Jeff Jordan, Matt Cohler, Greylock Discovery Fund, Accel’s Seed Fund, Menlo Ventures Talent Fund, Lerer Ventures, SV Angels and Ooga Labs.

    One more interesting aspect of PandoDaily is that it says it will honor embargos to put stories in its “PandoTicker,” but will require something exclusive for the main blog part. TechCrunch has been known to break an embargo or two in the past, under Arrington. Granted, Arrington was very up front about this in a post called “Death to the Embargo“.

    It will be interesting to see how this strategy plays out. My guess is that it will work pretty well, given the fame its writers already have within the industry.

  • TechCrunch Says TechCrunch “As We Know It” May Be Over

    TechCrunch Says TechCrunch “As We Know It” May Be Over

    Popular tech blog TechCrunch, which was acquired by AOL about a year ago appears to be in major turmoil, following news late last week that founder Michael Arrington is likely out of the company after launching CrunchFund, venture capital fund.

    Previously, we looked at a lot of the chatter taking place throughout the industry expressing various viewpoints about the whole thing, but now TechCrunch writer MG Siegler has written a pair of posts lending perhaps the most interesting point of view yet.

    “TechCrunch is on the precipice,” he writes on TechCrunch itself. “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. Certainly no one at TechCrunch. This site is about to change forever and we’re in the total fucking dark. I’ve been able to piece together little bits of information here and there, and it’s not looking good. Hence, this post.”

    He goes on to discuss how TechCrunch actually works as a publication and the editorial process, which has been the subject of critique by the mainstream media. Siegler calls out a particular article by The New York Times’ David Carr, which he discusses even more in a post on his personal blog.

    On that blog, ParisLemon, Siegler writes, “Journalists seem to think they can write about TechCrunch as if they’re looking in a mirror. That is to say, they think our operation runs in a similar manner to theirs and they use that as a jumping off point for misguided (but predictable) outrage. In reality, what they’re looking at when they look at TechCrunch is a crystal ball.”

    “First and foremost, the concept of an ‘editor’ at TechCrunch is essentially just a title and nothing more. Generally speaking, neither Mike nor Erick (TC’s two ‘co-editors’) are overlords that dictate what everyone else covers. With a few exceptions (mainly for newer writers), no one person even reads posts by any other author before they are posted,” Siegler explains. “Traditional journalists may be appalled to learn this. But this is a big key of why TechCrunch kicks their ass in tech coverage. We’re fast and furious in ways they can’t be, because they’re adhering to the old rules. Are there benefits to those old rules? Sure. But in my opinion, the benefits of the way we work far outweighs the benefits of the way they work.”

    He makes some pretty good points, and has a whole lot more to say about them in that post.

    Back in the TechCrunch post – property of AOL – he concludes that AOL may “TechCrunch as we know it may be over.”

    “AOL seems to think that by cutting off the biggest conflicts — ones so big that they’d obviously have to be disclosed — that they’ll be a bastion of integrity in the editorial landscape. What a bunch of horse shit,” Siegler says. “The conflicts we need to worry about are the ones not disclosed. They’re far more prevalent and they do actually deceive readers because they’re far more subtle. But that’s an impossible task. AOL can’t fix that — no one can. So instead they’ll slaughter the lamb everyone can see to gain puffery amongst the old media peers who also live to die another day.”

    When it was first announced that AOL would acquire TechCrunch, it caused quite a stir, and many wondered how TechCrunch would manage to keep doing things the way it had always done under the control of a huge media conglomerate. And that was before the Huffington Post was part of the equation.

    “I remember hanging out with the staff a year ago before the announcement was made that AOL had purchased Techcrunch and the rumors were just rolling over the staff,” says Robert Scoble in a Google+ post. “Some of the staff were dismayed (to put it lightly. At least one was crying). They thought that Techcrunch as we knew it was over then. Turns out they may have been right, although they kept a brave face on it for almost a year.”

    Some wondered, would TechCrunch be afraid to criticize AOL if it needed to be criticized? TechCrunch said this would not be the case, and AOL practically encouraged it.

    TechCrunch held true to its word, even going out of their way to spark blog wars with other AOL-owned properties like Engadget and Moviefone.

    Now, who knows?

    “It has almost been exactly one year since AOL acquired us,” Siegler writes. “At the time, they promised not to interfere with the way we do things. For 11+ months, they’ve kept their word, and things have run beautifully from our end. Our business is one of the few sterling ornaments on their mantel. Now they may break their promise to us. And if that promise is broken, it will break TechCrunch.”

    It’s going to be very interesting to see how things unfold, and how it affects AOL’s future acquisition strategy.