TechCrunch Dives Into More Controversy

Oh how the mighty have fallen—and just keep falling.

Once among the most respected, credible technology blogs on the Web, TechCrunch has been slammed with wave upon wave of controversy in recent weeks after the public learned that the blog’s founder and editor, Michael Arrington, was running an investment fund that poured money into many of the startups his publication was covering. He was later removed as editor by the site’s owners at AOL.

What perfect timing, then, for the site’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference, which on Wednesday announced its winning startup. Surely, the event would shift readers’ attention away from the scandal by nudging a few promising entrepreneurs and their fledgling startups into the spotlight. Anything to make TechCrunch fans forget about the Arrington mess, right?

In any event, the winner of the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 prize was Shaker, which lets users create customized, avatar-based chatrooms from their Facebook profiles, while data-storage firm Bitcasa and cloud-based service Prism Skylabs were selected runners-up. Interestingly enough, the three firms share a common backer, with one person already invested in both runners-up and awaiting a pending investment in the winner.

Who, you ask? Oh, you’re going to love this.

Michael Arrington.

That’s right, just when the last thing the site needed was another incident to catalyze readers’ already-mounting skepticism, TechCrunch awards its top honors to three companies backed by its controversial former editor.

Yikes, talk about a press nightmare. The only way this gets worse is if they actually let Arrington help judge the contest.

And yet that's precisely what they did.

In a comment posted on TechCrunch’s story announcing the finalists, Arrington wrote that he had “significant input into this list of finalists” and agreed on four of the companies included among the final seven. Here’s betting I know three of the four.

But let’s try to stay positive. At least the blog’s new editor, Erick Schonfeld, didn’t try to cover it all up by falsely telling readers that Arrington “was not involved in the selection” of the finalists.

Oh brother. Never mind.

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J.D. Harrison is an assistant editor at Portfolio.com.