TechCrunch can criticize AOL in its coverage

Michael Arrington, the founder of the TechCrunch news site that was purchased this week by AOL, writes about the deal and how it won’t change the site’s coverage of the Internet company.

Arrington writes, “Tim told me that he doesn’t want whatever makes TechCrunch special to go away. He also said it was important that we feel free to criticize AOL when we think they deserve it. And the agreement we signed with AOL fully reflects this. In particular, we used the Twitter document scandal as a test. If the same thing happens with AOL in the future, we should feel comfortable posting those documents. And in that unlikely event, we will.

“The last thing we want to happen is to end up with same cuddly relationship that the Wall Street Journal has with its sister company MySpace, for example.

“In the end, we’ll probably have to create internal checks to ensure that we aren’t more critical of AOL than we otherwise would be just to prove our editorial independence. And there is one thing that we probably won’t be able to avoid. You probably won’t see a lot of glowing blog posts about AOL in general. People will quite rightly suspect we’re just doing it to please our corporate parent. So we’ll probably leave the high fives to our competitors.”

Read more here.