Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arringtonis the American founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere. Magazines such as Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the Internet. In 2008, he was selected by TIME Magazine as one of the most influential people in the world...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth13 March 1970
CountryUnited States of America
I live a fairly simple life, and that didnt change much after I sold TechCrunch in 2010. I didnt buy a new house or even a new car. The one thing I did splurge on was a boat. Nothing too fancy or large.
I always try to find the truth in a situation. That unvarnished, pure nugget of truth at the core of every issue that I write about.
Write good content about stuff that you love. Readers will find you.
Just pick a political story at random and read the comments. There is no logic or reason on either side - only hypocrisy and hate.
Journalists hold themselves apart, and above, the common person. They have rules designed to ensure their objectivity and impartiality.
America is an unsolvable problem: a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup, wed understand how unfixable the situation is; most of us would leave for a fresh start, and the company would fall apart. America is MySpace.
I dont claim to be a journalist. I hold myself to higher standards of transparency and disclosure.
Some people ask why we don't just wait until we have the whole story before posting. The fact is that we sometimes can't get to the end story without going through this process... When a story is up and posted, it's amazing how many people come out of the woodwork to give us additional information... And readers love it.
Sometimes I have so many financial conflicts of interest that I can't even keep them straight.
If you really care about Facebook likes, don't just post your stuff to Twitter and then rely on it being republished automatically to Facebook. In my sample size of one, Facebook penalizes you significantly for that and shows that content to far fewer people.
Talking about Apple v. Microsoft without mentioning the Internet and the browser is like talking about WWII without talking about the nuke. Framing the conversation just in terms of open v. closed operating systems, the quality of the hardware or software or who the CEO was, is silly.
I'm nearly certain that Google accessed my Gmail account after I broke a major story about Google.
I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.
I'm worried about privacy - the companies out there gathering data on us, the stuff we do on Twitter, the publicly scrapeable stuff on Facebook. It's amazing how much data there is out there on us. I'm worried that it can be abused and will be abused.