Daily Tech and Gadget

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.

Teen entrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky has been fired from his internship at TechCrunch following allegations that he traded startup coverage for compensation. TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington broke the news in a post last night titled, “ An Apology to Our Readers .” He said that “someone I trust” had accused an intern of asking for a Macbook Air in exchange for writing a TechCrunch post about the startup. The allegation was supported by a subsequent investigation, and Arrington also uncovered “at least one other occasion” when Brusilovsky “almost certainly” received a computer in exchange for a post. In response, TechCrunch fired him and removed all of his posts from the site. Initially, Arrington didn’t disclose the name of the intern in question, but his identity has since been revealed as 17-year-old Brusilovsky, who is also founder of the teen publishing startup Teens in Tech .