Mr. Techcrunch ‘purposefully controversial’ at ONA

Michael Arrington is one of those few lucky bloggers. He started Techcrunch, and less than a year later started raking in the cash (estimates have him at the high end of six figures). Apparently, it’s gone to his head. In a panel at ONA 2006 with Jeff Jarvis and Mike Davidson, Arrington slammed the NY Times folks, then apologized, then slammed them again. He urged “mid-level” journalists to leave their jobs for blogging to easily triple their income (um, riiiight.) And then admitted he was “being purposefully controversial to liven things up a bit.” PaidContent’s Staci Kramer paraphrases a comment at the ONA dinner, after the panel: “Who’d have thought that Michael Arrington could make Jeff Jarvis and Mark Cuban seem calm?”