Crunched
Techcrunch supremo Michael Arrington has suspended Techcrunch UK and fired editor Sam Sethi following negative coverage of the Le Web 3 conference. In particular, conference organiser Loic Le Meur told Sam he was an ‘asshole’ in a comment on the blog following criticism of the conference. Arrington apparently decided that Sethi’s decision to draw attention to this comment rather than delete it as per Le Meur’s and his own preference was just cause for the sack. Updated: podcast interview here.
TechCrunch UK, just a few months old, has been tremendously successful in creating a community for local UK & Ireland Entrepreneurs. However, today I put the blog on hold and terminated our relationship with editor Sam Sethi.
Coverage of the conference across the blogosphere was extremely negative. Far more negative than Sam’s account. The row seems to be more about the editorial chain of command than the tenor of the coverage.
There’s a considerable moral battlefield here, especially as it applies to blogs. The blog format, by its nature, is ‘fast and loose’: tempers sometimes fray; people are a bit more spontaneous than they’d wish was recorded in a permanent form. Is it OK to delete posts? Is it OK to ask for comments to be withdrawn? Both are implicated here. We all say incautious things we’d rather we hadn’t from time to time. The Blogosphere, with its curious mix of immediacy and permanance, personal and public, challenges all established social conventions when it comes to those kinds of conversation.
I only met Sam once, but he appears to have done a great job of uniting the UK’s tech entrepreneurs and possessed considerable charisma. I’m sure he’ll be fine, going forward.
