Lamenting the demise of Business 2.0

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch writes an ode to departing business magazine Business 2.0 and discloses that he explored a merger between the magazine and his web site in the past year.

Arrington wrote, “I  first heard about Business 2.0 in 1998 when I saw a billboard on the 101 freeway near South San Francisco that advertised it, before the first issue came out. In 2001 it was sold to Time Warner, who’ve done little to grow the brand, and some say they were somewhat proactive in destroying it, always favoring the (in my opinion) sterile business magazine Fortune.

“The magazine was one of the first major media publications to cover TechCrunch, exactly one year ago in an article written by Paul Sloan and Paul Kaihla. That article, by the way, was the source of the infamous images of me smoking a cigar and burning $100 bills (I’ve since learned that you don’t actually have to do what the photographer tells you to do).

“Earlier this year Heather and I met with editor-in-chief Josh Quittner and we explored a merger between TechCrunch and Business 2.0. I believe we could have made the pieces fit in a way that would have worked well for both sides, but Time eventually squashed any deal by pulling them off the block and simply shutting it down (these discussions were confidential but recently leaked.”

Read more here.