Is TechCrunch doomed by payola scandal?
Late last week, tech biz bloggers were shocked — and a few were cruelly happy — to read that TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington had fired 17-year-old intern, entrepreneur and Internet fameball Daniel Brusilovsky . Arrington said the teenage overachiever had accepted a computer from a company in exchange for coverage on TechCrunch. Brusilovsky also admitted, Arrington said, to asking a different startup for a MacBook Air, which led that company to complain to Arrington. Not only did Big Mike cut Brusilovsky from staff, he removed all of Daniel’s posts — I counted 70 of them in Google’s cache — and posted a candid and legally-vetted description of the events, titled “ An Apology to Our Readers .” So of course the hot topic of discussion among local journalists over the weekend was, is TechCrunch’s reputation shot now? TechCrunch isn’t a newspaper, so its staff aren’t bound by the well-established and very strict boundaries given to print news writers.
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VentureBeat
