Michael Arrington, founder of the popular technology news blog TechCrunch, traveled to Washington, DC, last weekend to participate in a panel discussion at the annual conference of the Online News Association. He apparently used the occasion to excoriate newspapers and the journalists who work for them, directing his ire most pointedly at the New York Times and its coverage of technology. He cast particular aspersions on an October 2005 Times story on a startup named Inform. As another panelist, the blogger Jeff Jarvis, reported, “Arrington launched attacks on news media, contending that journalists will be losing their jobs and that reporters are fools if they don’t quit and start blogs. He then tried to sucker-punch The New York Times, arguing that the only reason the paper could have written a favorable story about the startup Inform was if the reporter or editor had ties, financial or otherwise, with the firm.”

Arrington himself, on his personal blog, wrote about his experience:

I made a few main points when I spoke. I said that Digg was more interesting to me than the New York Times because the crowd determines what’s on the home page, not some editor I neither know nor necessarily trust. I also made some points about journalism in general after a few defensive flurries were sent my way. First, that most mainstream media isn’t interesting to me because they report news so late. By the time something hits the New York Times, it’s usually at least a day old in the blogosphere. Second, I was discouraged by the fact that there is no discussion in mainstream media. Publications never cite their competition, and readers cannot say what they think (as they can with blog comments). And third, I encouraged journalists who were stuck in the big media machine, with their career going nowhere, to consider blogging as an alternative … I also called out the New York Times in particular – their recent launch of an offline new reader showed that they don’t get what consumers really want, I said. And I also said that many of the fluff pieces in the Times technology section must either be generated from back scratching, or lack of understanding of the product … Instead of sparking an intelligent debate I was roundly attacked. It’s the first time I addressed “real” journalists head on, and all I saw was fear, loathing and disdain.

When he called into question the ethics of the New York Times reporter, Arrington was upbraided both by his co-panelist and by the audience. Jarvis wrote: “I challenged him immediately, saying that this is a grave charge and that he clearly had no facts to back it up; he said as much. I also made it clear that Inform is, in some ways, a competitor with Daylife and that Arrington is also an investor in Daylife. It didn’t stop him. He repeated this attack, among others, on The Times. It was most uncomfortable, even embarrassing.” Staci Kramer of the PaidContent blog, who attended the session, also reported that Arrington “accused an NYT reporter of going in the tank on a story, then apologized when confronted directly by the NYT’s Jim Roberts, who challenged him to provide facts or back down. His reply: ‘I apologize. I have no facts to support my statement.'”

As I read of Arrington’s disparaging comment about the Times article, I recalled, with some disquiet, an exchange I had with him back in early February. At the time, there was a heated discussion going on about conflicts of interest among bloggers, a discussion spurred by a February 9 Wall Street Journal article by Rebecca Buckman on the lack of clear ethical standards in the blogosphere. Buckman interviewed Arrington for her article, and he stressed that, though he both wrote about Web 2.0 startups and acted as an adviser to some of them, he was always careful to disclose any possible conflict of interest. I had been following Arrington’s blog, and as I read his statements in the Journal I was reminded of what I had previously sensed to be a possible conflict related to his long-undisclosed involvement with a startup named Edgeio. After finishing the Journal article, I read back through some of Arrington’s writings, and, on the morning of February 10, I drafted the following post, which I intended to publish on this blog:

Rebecca Buckman’s controversial Wall Street Journal article about possible conflicts of interest in the blogosphere has provided a good occasion for taking stock (no pun intended). As Buckman wrote, the ethics of blogging “can be a murky issue in today’s clubby blogosphere, where many people including venture capitalists, lawyers and journalists write about Web issues and companies – and often, each other – with little editing. The rebound in Silicon Valley’s economy, coupled with the popularity of cheap, easy-to-use blogging tools, means there are more aspiring commentators than ever opining about start-ups and tech trends on the Web. And increasingly, it is difficult to discern their allegiances.”

One example of the murkiness that surrounds bloggers’ allegiances can be found in Michael Arrington’s much-read and much-quoted TechCrunch blog. Arrington does a great job of covering new “Web 2.0” companies and services. His reviews are smart and succinct, and they get a lot of attention. Arrington and his blog are mentioned in Buckman’s article:

“One popular blog that often writes positively about young tech companies, TechCrunch, is run by a lawyer and entrepreneur, Michael Arrington, who occasionally serves as an adviser to companies he has written about. He sometimes receives stock in those small companies, he says. But Mr. Arrington says he generally doesn’t write about start-ups he’s advising after he becomes affiliated with them -and ‘if I did, I would put a disclaimer up’ on the blog, he says.”

Arrington’s to be applauded for his commitment to disclosure, but the issue may be more complicated then it at first seems. What happens, for instance, when Arrington reviews new sites or services that compete with ones he’s affiliated with? Does he – should he? – also disclose his interests in those cases? How does one balance one’s role as an unbiased reviewer with one’s role as a paid adviser?

As Buckman notes, Arrington is an entrepreneur as well as a blogger and an adviser. In particular, he’s a cofounder of a soon-to-be-launched company named Edgeio. Edgeio began to unveil itself earlier this week when Arrington’s partner, Keith Teare, talked about the service in a presentation. Business Week’s Rob Hof attended the presentation and summed up Edgeio’s business model: “essentially, Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering ‘listings from the edge’ – classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.” As an aggregator of personal ads, Edgeio will compete with such powerhouses as eBay and Craigslist. It will also compete with Google Base, another new service that provides an alternative way to aggregate classified advertising.

Back on October 25, 2005, as rumors about Google Base first began to swirl around the blogosphere, Arrington wrote this about Base on his blog: “Google Base appears to be a service to publish content directly to google and have them host it in a centralized way. If so, this would be going completely against the accelerating trend of decentralized publishing. My prediction: when the dust settles, this will either be largely ignored or universally hated. Centralized content is boring … so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?” Arrington didn’t mention his connection with Edgeio in the post, though, in retrospect, his comment that “so much is going on at the edge of the web, why would anyone try to put it all back in the center?” describes one of the key assumptions underlying Edgeio’s service – and one of its key points of differentiation from Base.

Clearly, Edgeio must have been much on Arrington’s mind at the time. Four days before the Base post, on October 21, TechCrunch had hosted its third “Meet-up” event, one of whose sponsors was Edgeio. Two days after his Base post, on October 27, he announced his connection with Edgeio in a post, noting that he and his cofounders had been working on the service “for most of this year.” He provided a teaser about what Edgeio would do, without going into any details: “Edgeio will give you the ability to do new and (we think) really exciting things with your blog. If you have a weblog and you’d like to be part of early testing, there is a field for giving us your blog address as well.”

On November 11, 2005, Google officially launched its Base service, Arrington immediately trashed it in a review titled “Google Base Launched. Yuck.” His “bottom line” assessment of Google Base went as follows: “This is not a very interesting application in its current form. Keith Teare says it’s like a 1985 dBASE file with less functionality. It’s ugly. It’s centralized content with less functionality than ebay or craigslist. The content is not integrated directly into Google search results, but ‘relevance’ can bump it up into main and local search (and froogle).”

Again, no mention of his involvement with a company that would compete with Google Base.

Arrington’s reviews of Base are entirely reasonable. Some people praised Base when it appeared, but plenty of other people were highly critical of it, in the same ways that Arrington was. There’s no reason to think that his reactions to Base were anything but sincere. At the same time, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t colored by his involvement with Edgeio. The story underscores one of the tricky questions that Buckman’s article has brought to the surface: How many hats can a blogger wear?

I hesitated before publishing the post. I thought it only fair to ask Arrington for his perspective. So, on the morning of February 10, I sent him the following email:

Dear Mr. Arrington,

I write the Rough Type blog (roughtype.com) and am a dedicated reader of your TechCrunch blog. In the wake of the WSJ blogging story, I’ve been thinking about the complex issue of disclosure in the blogosphere. It fits with a broader subject that interests me deeply: the reliability of information provided on the web and, particularly, provided through the Web 2.0 model. I noted your statement on the subject of disclosure in the WSJ piece and wanted to follow up with you for a followup post I’m writing on this subject.

You note in the Journal that you avoid writing about companies you’re affiliated with. But what about writing about companies that compete with companies you’re affiliated with? I’m thinking, in particular, of two critical reviews you posted about Google Base last fall (Oct. 25 and Nov. 11). You didn’t mention in either of those posts that you were a cofounder of a company, Edgeio, that would compete with Base for listings. In retrospect, do you think you should have disclosed the Edgeio affiliation? And if not, why not? More broadly, how do you think about striking the right balance between being an impartial reviewer and also pursuing business interests?

I don’t mean to put you on the spot. I just want to make sure I know your perspective on the subject.

Thanks,

Nick Carr

Some hours later, Arrington responded with this email:

check out my posts on oodle, a direct competitor, and other classifieds companies like Microsoft Expo.

Today is a bad day to make accusastions like this. http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=144

Before you post an attack piece, please make sure you research the facts.

Mike

I was disappointed that he didn’t bother to answer or even acknowledge my questions, but I did find and read his reviews of Oodle and Microsoft Expo. And they were positive reviews. About Oodle he wrote: “Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner.” About Expo he wrote: “I have been testing the service, and there are features that are top notch. This is going to be an impressive product.” In neither case, though, did he disclose that he was engaged in launching a competing classifieds site.

Nevertheless, it seemed to me that, even though I believed he should have disclosed what I viewed as a conflict of interest, he was not being duplicitous. Also, I felt genuinely sorry that he had been called a racist that day (as the link in his email revealed). So I decided to give him a break and not run the post I’d written. I informed him of my decision in the following email:

Thanks for the response and for pointing me to the Oodle and Expo reviews. I’m not pursuing this.

Sorry about the grotesque racism charge.

Nick

The next day, he wrote back:

Nick,

I apologize for my email yesterday. I was a total jerk. It was a very bad day, but that is no reason to take it out on you.

You raise a good point and it is something that I have to deal with in an honest way.

Mike

That same day, Arrington wrote a brief post about Edgeio, which began, “Edgeio is a startup that I co-founded with Keith Teare last year. Because of the clear conflict of interest I won’t be writing about edgeio that much on TechCrunch.” He made no mention of his earlier critiques of other classifieds sites.

I’m not sure if I did the right thing in withholding the post I’d written. I think it raised valid issues – issues that bloggers should be struggling with, rather than ignoring – and though I believed Arrington was giving an honest review of Google Base, I also believed that the review was influenced by his involvement with a competing company pursuing a different strategy – a strategy that was implicitly promoted in his criticism of Base’s strategy (and in his praise of Oodle’s strategy). Arrington, I still think, made a mistake in failing to disclose his financial interest in a classifieds site when he reviewed other classifieds sites. I have no doubt that if he had written such reviews for the Times, or pretty much any other newspaper, without disclosing his conflict of interest, he would have lost his job – and rightly so. It seems strange, in this light, that he would choose to question in a public forum the integrity of a newspaper and one of its reporters.

But maybe it’s not so strange. Blogging is a new and immature medium, with few rules and few traditions, and bloggers have a tendency to think of themselves as being liberated from the constraints of traditional media. That’s only natural. But it’s also, in large measure, an illusion. Many of the constraints that reporters operate under evolved over the years in order to temper the freedoms that could lead, and sometimes did lead, to the abuse of the public trust. Traditional journalism has its weaknesses, as any journalist will tell you, but it has many strengths as well, strengths that are hard-earned and worthy of respect. Many bloggers assume that blogging represents a step forward when, in important ways, it actually represents a step backward.

When it comes to conflicts of interest, or other questions of journalistic ethics, the proper attitude that we bloggers should take toward our counterparts in the traditional press is not arrogance but humility. In this area, as in others, blogs have far more to learn from newspapers than newspapers have to learn from blogs.