Early this morning, Mike Arrington released a long diatribe on his meta-crunch blog, Crunchnotes. Its a lengthy affair, in which he feels the need to riposte certain attacks by bloggers, new media types looking for attention, and now, traditional media types as well.

In particular, he describes a recent situtation in which a competitor to a web2.0 company he profiled complained bitterly how they didn’t get equal exposure, thinking that perhaps it was because of Arrington’s personal connections which a) led to the profile and b) led to the competition NOT getting a profile.

But all vitriol aside, the most interesting bit in his diatribe were these particular paragraphs:

TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.

I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn’t going to change. I also write about startups. That isn’t going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn’t come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren’t. We never have been. We never will be.

[emphasis, my own -- I love emphasizing stuff!]

And I think this is when I had my own epiphany about blogging.

While we may all think we are disciples at the holy church of Authenticity, praying for divine guidance so that we may live in the holy light of Transparency, the real fact is that blogging’s connected nature makes it impossible to be truly impartial.

After all, the very nature backtracks, Google Juice, PageRank, and “A-list” status is all about connections in the first place; one cannot get connections without being friendly, without being a little bit of the supplicant within that exchange. And then it gets reversed.

When one does have The Juice, you start getting all kinds of people knocking at your door wanting links / a relationship where there was nothing there before.

And really, doesn’t “relationships” make the holy trinity of blogging together with “authenticity” and “transparency”?
Sure, its naive to think traditional journalism is totally impartial as well, because “real” journos do make friendships to further the story and sometimes cannot help but be involved with the story itself.

But I think blogging — and TechCrunch, and Mr. Arrington — differs in that whereas traditional journalism strives for the ideal of impartiality, blogs like TechCrunch revel in their impartiality.

TechCrunch and blogs like it strive for the ideal of the story, perhaps at the expense of impartiality — and its a line that they happily cross, precisely because its in their nature to do so. TechCrunch gets and breaks the news because it is in bed “with” the news.

Rather than getting our underwear in knots about whether or not this level of intimacy between “journalist” and “news source” is ethical, I think we should re-gear our own expectations about journalism and blogging.

Bloggers, like Mike Arrington, are clearly not journalists in the way we think of journalists, because of that ideal they do (or don’t) strive for. And if today’s rant is any indication, they don’t want to be thought of that way either.

My answer is that since we live in a market economy, perhaps the time is right for TechCrunch to meet a news site (or blog?) on the web2.0 with a traditional standard of impartiality and integrity.

(The Anti-crunch?)

It might not break the stories like TechCrunch would — but it would provide their readers — and reviewees — with at least the appearance of not granting favours, playing favourites, and being friends with the very topics of examination they are supposed to be “reporting” on.