Not content to let the gigantic egos of Jason Calacanis (ex of Netscape) and Nick Denton (former and current editor of Valleywag) battle it out alone, TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington decided to wade into the fray with a post on the recent back-and-forth posts by J.C. and N.D. For what it’s worth, Mikey seems to be siding with Jason rather than Nick.
As my friend Rob Hyndman points out, this is all very High School 2.0. And it’s obvious from reading the comments at TechCrunch that even some fans of Mike’s think talking about the bitchy posts by Denton and Calacanis is beneath him. “I thought this was TechCrunch, not DaysOfOurLivesCrunch,” says one. Another suggested the post belonged on Mike’s personal blog, CrunchNotes, “if that.”
As I said in the comments on Rob’s post, blogs and social media are inherently more personal and more interactive than traditional media — and that personalized nature comes through in many ways. It’s true that you would never see that sort of behaviour in the “old” media (apart from the gossip columns), but that’s because old media is by its nature more impersonal. With a more personalized media, you have to take the good with the bad.
The Scobleizer says that we need both Valleywag to tear things down and TechCrunch to build things up, and then reaches for a somewhat bizarre geological metaphor, with Mike Arrington as the famous Yosemite landmark El Capitan and Jason Calacanis Nick Denton as (I think) a glacier. He’s right though. For better or worse, both TechCrunch and Valleywag have their purposes.
