Would it surprise you to know that BoomTown doesn’t really care anymore if TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sidelines as a blogger while he makes investments in tech companies his tech news site covers?

In a post yesterday, titled “An Update to My Investment Policy,” Arrington made his seemingly cogent arguments that plenty of disclosure made it all “fine,” took one of his typical look-at-me swipes at anyone who dared to question this logic (apparently, we’re crappy “direct” competitors, so we haters have no standing to comment!) and presumably went on his merry investing way.

While I was first irked–because it was an appalling show to many of us cranky standards-insisting whiners–I soon realized Arrington had made a good argument about who he is and, frankly, who he has always been.

In other words, it’s a kind of there-he-goes-again thing, vaguely icky but hardly surprising and completely genuine.

Meanwhile, his new boss, AOL content head Arianna Huffington, pointed me to his post in an email.

When I asked her for an on-the-record comment, as usual, she politely and quickly complied, writing in support of Arrington:

“TechCrunch is committed to transparency. Michael has written about the guidelines he follows–that he rarely writes about companies in which he is an investor, and that, when he does, he clearly discloses this information. The same rules apply when TechCrunch’s writers cover these companies.”

Hold the phone.

Because while I kind of understand where Arrington is coming from, what I don’t understand is how this kind of convenient and on-the-fly rule-making can govern a much larger company whose strongly and repeatedly stated goal by Huffington herself is to create quality journalism.

Since I believed Huffington–whom I like very much as an Internet figure and as a friend–I was confused at what the rules for the whole of AOL content were now.

That’s why I sent her a long new list of questions to answer, which are:

1) What are, if any, the ethical guidelines about making investments for the editorial staff at HuffPo media group properties?

2) Since Arrington now seems to have permission to do so from you, can other editors at AOL properties do the same–that is, make very adjacent investments to what their site covers, as long as they disclose it? For example, can an editor who runs the entertainment site make investments in entertainment companies she/he has coverage responsibility over? (By the way, did you give him permission to make these investments? Did he ask?)

3) Is there anyone who polices what is fair coverage of competitors–i.e. companies competing with companies your editors invest in?

4) If an editor makes investments in a company and someone who works for them writes about that company, does that editor have to recuse himself from the story? Is that even possible?

5) Since you just fired someone for what you called an ethical breach–asking freelancers to work for free and also seemingly defending an attempt to curry favor with an advertiser/client–why is this not an ethical breach?

I had a lot more questions, still unanswered by Huffington, but you can see where this is going.

Simply put, does AOL, which is touting itself as a 21st-century media company, need to have 21st-century rules of the road? Or perhaps not so much?

UPDATE: Now, it is a real clown circus at AOL, with the company declaring that editorial personnel cannot make investments, except Arrington!

“As a rule, in order to avoid conflicts of interests, AOL Huffington Post Media Group editors, writers, and reporters may not have a financial interest in a company or industry that they regularly cover,” AOL said in a statement to Business Insider today, even though I nicely asked for a comment on the issue yesterday. “Arrington operates from a unique position.”

And how! Where do I get such a faboo ethical hall pass from Content Principal Huffington?

I suppose I should go all slouching-towards-Bethlehem here, and wring my hands over this unusual ruling, but what’s the use?

As you might have read: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

How did this all start, especially since I feel like this ridiculous tempest in a Silicon Valley teapot over Arrington’s investment-making might actually be my fault a little bit?

Here’s why:

On Tuesday night around 10 pm (just when I start getting revved up), I wrote a testy email to Arrington’s bosses at AOL–Huffington and CEO Tim Armstrong–as well as the Internet portal’s sharp PR head, asking for a response about what seemed to me to be a glaring conflict of interest at TechCrunch related to new investment activity by Arrington and the site’s coverage of those particular companies he had invested in.

It was all disclosed, of course, but it still felt, as I said, icky.

And, given the recent and loudly stated goal of promoting quality journalism by Huffington–including the recent dismissal of AOL’s Moviefone site editor over what the company considered ethical lapses–it seemed pertinent to ask.

Mostly because I don’t think they actually knew much–if at all–about Arrington’s increasing investing action. Armstrong said as much in an email to me, and Huffington assured me they were going to check it out tout de suite.

But rather than the answer I was waiting on, up popped Arrington’s missive yesterday, which I assume came after his bosses asked for some info on this.

In it, he explained his controversial decision to go back into investing again, in what is clearly a more significant manner.

It was a practice he had abandoned years earlier, apparently after being pecked by detractors for it.

But, dear readers, no more! Let Arrington be Arrington!

And that seems to be a talented blogger with a flare for the dramatic, with a clearly sharply-honed news nose and sassy writing skills, but a scribe who much prefers to be a playah than just an observer and chronicler of that play.

And, after more reflection, I thought: Well, maybe it is a better idea for Arrington to go play with all the boys in Silicon Valley, which would probably be more fun than taking flack for lack of traditional journalistic ethics he never ascribed to in the first place.

I once jokingly nicknamed Arrington Yertle the Turtle after the Dr. Seuss book on one dubious king of one small pond in Sala-Ma-Sond, after he went particularly nuts on the topic of news-embargo breaking.

That diatribe on how he saw news rules–which is to say, there aren’t any that bind him–was vintage Arrington, too. And, after reading his latest post, I suddenly realized that it’s pointless to give a turtle a hard time for not being a fish.

But Huffington is another story. She has put herself in word and deed right into the center of the debate on where news is going on the Web, especially after AOL paid $315 million for her Huffington Post news and opinion site.

Huffington has certainly taken a lot of hits over the years as the HuffPo has grown, some deserved, but she has clearly led an impressive effort.

In fact, I think the cute-kitten and celebrity-loving angle played up by her detractors to dismiss her is silliness, because she and the Huffington Post are clearly more than that and are obviously having a major impact on the future direction of content in the digital age.

But that power she has sought also gives her a responsibility to say exactly what that means on a real and granular and consistent level, beyond the platitudes of wanting to make great journalism that she declares all the time now.

In other words, very specifically: What does Arianna Huffington stand for in regards to journalism? What are her rules and standards and codes? And, perhaps more importantly, what does she not stand up for?

These are questions I hope Huffington–who is really good at smacking back at criticism, too (See: the New York Times’ Bill Keller)–will address in one of her patented blog-xplosions and many times over, too.

Until then, here’s a link to my very long and very detailed ethics disclosure on All Things Digital, which is exactly how our little site thinks it should be in the digital age.

In short, besides signing the Dow Jones Code of Conduct–standard at The Wall Street Journal and other DJ publications–all our editorial staff is required to also pen their own in-plain-English personal and detailed account of disclosures that are pertinent to their job.

(You can read an extensive interview with me on the subject, in fact, which was posted here by Two Bananas Marketing, this week.)

My ATD disclosure is probably the most detailed of all of them, since I gay-married Megan Smith a dozen years ago. She later became a VP at Google, which I cover from time to time, especially related to other companies I focus on more, such as Yahoo.

Most of the time, if you care to read my posts on Google, I am probably tougher and snarkier than not, mostly because I know the search giant from its earliest days.

And, even though I once wrote extensively for the Journal about Google since its founding and before Megan arrived there, I thought it wise to lay it all out in detailed detail.

(By the way, if you want to try to tweak me by asking what News Corp.-owned Fox News’ ethics rules are, I don’t know, as ATD belongs to Dow Jones, which has had them forever. I will say, though, that Roger Ailes often freaks me out.)

In any case, as Arrington preaches, the more disclosure the better, and perhaps I should say even more so here, given the current swirl, by noting explicitly that I garner exactly no financial benefits from my relationship with Megan.

That might seem odd, because she certainly earns more. But I don’t know how much nor do I ask, since we have separate bank accounts and she always pays up–well, almost always–when half the bills are due. While it sounds painfully un-romantic, we only spend overall what each of us can afford equally in an exact 50-50 split.

In addition, I also legally signed away all rights to inheritance–although I had no such marriage rights in the first place, being gay–of Megan’s assets, which are in a trust for her relatives and our sons (for when they are too old to have any fun).

More to the point, I believe this makes me the only person to marry an exec at a hot Silicon Valley company with no prospect of any gold-digging.

Thus, I clearly would make the worst investor ever–not that I ever invest in tech or plan to while I am a reporter covering the sector.

Thank god, I suppose, that Michael Arrington is there to take up the slack.

Until now, business operations has been managed by Shona Brown, who had also once run “People Operations,” as human resources is called at Google.

More recently, HR has been run by VP Laszlo Bock, who initially reported to Brown and later directly to former CEO Eric Schmidt.

He will now report to Pichette, sources said.

Brown will narrow her duties to leading Google’s philanthropic efforts, via Google.org. She takes over from new business development VP Megan Smith (please see disclosure below), who has run “Dot Org” on an interim basis as its general manager since the departure of its initial high-profile Executive Director Larry Brilliant in 2009.

Google declined to comment on personnel matters.

Brown has been with Google since 2003 (which was well after Larry 1.0; Eric Schmidt became CEO in 2001). Here’s how my colleague John Paczkowski described her role last week:

Before she came to Google, Brown spent a decade consulting for McKinsey and is widely credited with optimizing Google’s internal structure.

But Page is not a McKinsey guy and he’s obviously not a big fan of Google’s current management organization anymore.

That might not bode well for the legendarily sharp-elbowed Brown who most sources describe as highly strategic but also as extremely difficult to work with.

Still, if Page is tinkering with the way Google is organized, Brown might also be the one he turns to to find a new structure.

That said, he seems to be fine doing it on his own and some suggest Brown will move to another role within the company rather than leaving.

Not all agree.

Said one source: “I wouldn’t be shocked to see Shona go. Frankly, I’m surprised she survived as long as she did, but then I didn’t think Rosenberg would last this long either.”

But, said another about Brown, who has previously taken time off from Google and returned: “I’d never count Shona out.”

Page’s big reorg aims to make the 12-year-old company he co-founded faster and more innovative to fend off the stagnation of middle age. The first step was removing long-time product chief Jonathan Rosenberg, followed by the elevation of seven long-time product leaders to senior vice president of their respective domains: Sundar Pichai (Chrome), Vic Gundotra (social), Andy Rubin (mobile), Salar Kamangar (YouTube), Alan Eustace (search), Susan Wojcicki (ads) and Jeff Huber (local and commerce).

And as for the newest big winner, Patrick Pichette? Unlike many of the others in Page’s inner circle, Pichette is a more recent Googler. After spending seven years at Bell Canada, Pichette replaced the retiring George Reyes in 2008.

Pichette has been a regular presence on Google quarterly earnings calls, the next of which is this Thursday at 1:30 PT. While whatever Google did in the first quarter of 2011 was surely interesting, the call should be the first public comment on the new Page regime. It will be a big test for Page, who notoriously loathes the public eye.

Meanwhile, Google’s management bio page should be sent packing to the Internet Archive any day now.

While it’s only a week out of date–my, how things have changed.

(Full disclosure: Smith is married to All Things Digital Co-Executive Editor Kara Swisher.)

BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference.

Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday.

U.S. speakers include TED’s Chris Anderson, News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace’s Amit Kapur, Marissa Mayer of Google (GOOG), Linda Avey of 23andMe, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft (MSFT).

And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard, and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

Of course, there’s a passel of bloggers here like BoomTown. I’ll be interviewing Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon (AMZN) and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

Besides this conference, Loïc Le Meur has been trying to make a go of it with his San Francisco-based start-up Seesmic, which–like a lot of Web 2.0 companies–has recently made cutbacks. See my video interview below with him in better times, when I visited Seesmic in February.

You can also watch the conference streamed live from its site. More shaky–but Frenchtastic, although no lip-synching extravaganzas for me!–videos from me at Le Web to come, of course.

[Full disclosure: My partner, Google exec Megan Smith (you can read all about it here in detail), is judging a start-up competition at Le Web on Wednesday. But I am trying to find an excuse not to go to that panel, because I always nod off at those things, even if the crazy version of Britney Spears were a judge. Instead, I hopefully will be enjoying the lovely artwork at the Louvre right then.]

Another day, another tech blog eruption featuring Michael “The Volcano” Arrington of TechCrunch and, this time, Wired’s Betsy “Ain’t-Backing-Down” Schiffman.

When last we checked in with Arrington, he was elegantly telling Chris Shipley that her longstanding tech conference might want to take a dirt nap. Specifically: “Demo needs to die.”

But that’s not all!

Before that, Arrington was comparing tech blogs to gangs and contemplating bloody fights with some post-bashing tango. In it, he advised tech blogs not to raise money and talked of the importance of sector roll-ups without, oops, actually mentioning TechCrunch was both considering raising money and doing a roll-up of tech blogs.

Here’s one incredible quote from the piece: “Personally, I’ve found that if a fight is necessary, fight clean and fight hard. Make it as bloody as possible and end it fast, with no loose ends dangling about. Leave no lingering emotional stone unturned. When everyone gets up and dusts themselves off, the issue should have been resolved one way or the other, and both sides should be happy to shake hands and tango another day, even if the handshaking is done privately.”

In the latest kerfuffle, Schiffman wrote what was a minor criticism at the very end of a piece about a syndication deal that TechCrunch struck with the Washington Post (WPO).

She wrote: “We’ve got nothing against TechCrunch, but it seems crazy-crazy to us that the Washington Post, a paper known for the sort of reporting that can take down U.S. presidents, is publishing content written by a dude who invests in the companies he writes about. But what do we know.”

Snarky yes, but Arrington writes like this all the time (as does BoomTown).

More importantly, since Arrington does actually invest in several companies and says he also advises some covered by TechCrunch (see here in a very short disclosure, given he invested his own money), it is not an outrageous point to make related to a deal with a venerable media institution like the Post.

In any case, Arrington has got to have heard this one before and in much worse ways.

I know I have many times due to my relationship with Megan Smith, who is currently a vice president at Google (GOOG), as is disclosed here in detail, even though I do not own one single share in the company and–TMI–we split all costs exactly down to the penny (except for all those pricey over-and-above-birthdays-and-Christmas toys she likes to buy for our kids, which I sensibly refuse to pay for).

As I wrote in my disclosure: “I am well aware of the controversies surrounding ethics online now swirling about, some of which have resulted in giving readers some pause about the quality and honesty of some in the blogosphere. Such wariness is always a good thing for everyone and I encourage readers to ask tough questions and demand more of those providing them information of all kinds. I know that I am asking for a large measure of trust from readers of the site, and I pledge to do everything I can to be deserving of that trust.”

So I get maybe being irked, especially if you are trying to be as transparent as possible, and maybe writing Wired a stern note saying it was unfair.

But instead of that, he chose to respond by putting out another set of classy bons mots on Twitter: “Wow. F*** You too, Wired.”

In a post yesterday, peacefully titled “OK, Wired, Let’s Do This,” Arrington blamed this explosion on “a night of heavy drinking at the Time 100 party.”

OK, maybe he’s drunk and incredibly rash, but it was liquor imbibed at a very important soiree!

But post-drinking, I assume since it was posted in the afternoon, Arrington followed up with another winner on Twitter: “No one at Wired is responding to me today about their post yesterday. I’m organizing a Wired burning party (the mag, not their offices).”

Well, phew, just the magazines on fire! Ha, ha, ha!

Actually, not funny at all–I am just humorless about book-burning, so I will take any and all criticism on the subject for that stance, given the ugly history of the burning of media–but there you have it.

Except not at all.

Arrington wrote his own piece yesterday, which was meant to be reasonable, although it was seeping with indignation about small slights over when and how Wired responded to him (which appeared to have been done, but not to his liking, as Wired’s follow-up responding to Arrington’s antics recounted) and with too much of a gotcha focus on what is a dumb, name-calling tag word Wired used on the story.

But while he was right about the juvenile tag, Arrington then, like clockwork, in the very same piece called Schiffman a “troll.”

Well, at least he’s consistent.

But not at all like what I know the Washington Post expects from those it affiliates with, which is to say making the highest and most strenuous efforts to be civil, fair and temperate.

While it has not always succeeded at this–its Janet Cooke debacle in the early 1980s, for example, was a black eye–the Post has always tried to aim for the highest of standards.

How do I know this? Because I started delivering mail at the Post while I was in college at Georgetown University, was later an intern there and then a reporter for a decade more.

I could not be more proud of my time there or be more in admiration of the people who work there every day–even in these tough times for newspapers–who try very hard to act, when representing the Post, as professionals.

No one exemplifies that more than the Post’s owner and CEO Don Graham (pictured here), whom I admire profoundly. At once a gentle soul and also wise to the ways of the world, Graham is a true hero of mine.

While I love my various jobs at Dow Jones (NWS), I have missed being at the Post many times over the years, and Graham and I have always been in touch.

So I am very sorry to see the Post dragged into this temper tantrum by one of its new contributors, sullying its fine reputation.

And if it is just showboating, as some have suggested–a traffic-inducing faux wrestling match for the cheap seats in the back (and they are cheap)–than it is a lousy show.

In any case, Arrington will surely once again–as he has–claim that competitors like Wired and also this site should not comment on his behavior at TechCrunch (and, just to be clear, AllThingsD, wholly owned by Dow Jones, is not vying with TechCrunch to appear in the Washington Post either).

But standards and public online conduct are an increasingly important issue, if the blogosphere–as I believe Arrington must want also–is to have the kind of credibility it deserves.

And while Arrington and I obviously do not see eye-to-eye on a lot of stuff–I have criticized some of TechCrunch’s practices and Arrington’s own professional behavior directly to him via email and to others and I have even written about it several times (here, for example)–I do admire TechCrunch’s energy and relentless focus and the way it has forced others to compete more rigorously in covering the Web 2.0 sector.

And, lastly, whether Schiffman or I question such a syndication deal, it really does not matter, since it is solely up to the editors of the Post as to what they want to publish.

So, if they choose TechCrunch, that’s their decision.

But–and I can’t wait to see what delightful name Arrington slings at me for saying so–TechCrunch, in accepting what is a real honor and validation from one of this country’s great media organizations, should be ashamed of returning the favor by dragging the Post into a largely unprovoked and dirty gutter fight.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google. ]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080514/memo-to-don-graham-thar-he-blows/feed/ 11