After Arrington cut ties with AOL, it was only time before his loyal staff followed. Paul Carr is the first defector. As he writes in a post up at TechCrunch, his departure shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given the way things played out. "A little over a week ago I wrote that, unless Mike Arrington was allowed to choose his own successor as editor of TechCrunch, I would no longer write for the site. Sure enough, this past Monday, a statement from AOL announced Erick Schonfeld as the new editor." 

While readers might not find his resignation surprising, they might find his (mostly) kind words for Arriana Huffington don't follow the Arrington trope. 

For what it’s worth--and this is the point in this post where I suspect Mike and I will part company--I still have a lot of time for Arianna Huffington. I was the first TechCrunch writer to celebrate her appointment as Editor in Chief of AOL and I still stand by much of what I wrote in my post welcoming Our Huffington Overlord. In this situation, though, I think she screwed up badly by allowing her growing personal animosity towards Mike--and, let’s be clear, this fight was almost entirely personal--to rule her head, ejecting Mike completely from the company he founded and installing his polar opposite as a puppet editor. As Barry Diller put it on Wednesday: "So now, he’s gone, and now they own this thing, which has no voice. Congratulations. What a good piece of business."

Carr's just the first. We wonder who might come next. 

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