Revenge is a dish best served cold, and the relationship between Web entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has been downright frosty of late, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that Calacanis is mounting a direct challenge to Arrington.
Calacanis said he will launch a startup editorial project and event called Launch, taking direct aim at TechCrunch, paidContent reported, keeping its focus on writing and editorial. In fact, Launch will debut as an email publication, Calacanis told paidContent, adding:
When I started with Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight. Now it’s even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility.
If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it’s the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online — much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog.
I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity.
Until then I’m listening to the audience and testing what they like. But I’m going for something that doesn’t exist in the market — not a blogger writing the story in two hours. The world really wants deeper stuff right now.
