Michael Arrington

The company is sold to First Data for $32 million. Arrington:

I made enough to buy a Porsche. Not much more.

Arrington starts a nine-month vacation in a rented beach condo in L.A.

All I did was work out, surf, and watch movies. I watched almost every movie at Blockbuster — three a day for a year.

Arrington speaks on a panel of bloggers about the state of the media at the ONA conference. He blogs about the event:

I thought this was going to be an attempt to bridge the gap between blogging and big media. All I saw was a fear and an unassailable resistance to change.

He says Digg is more interesting than the New York Times as the crowd decides what goes on the front page, not an anonymous editor, that mainstream media report stories late, and there is no discussion.

And third, I encouraged journalists who were stuck in the big media machine, with their career going nowhere, to consider blogging as an alternative (I was also going to say that I was hiring, and for people to contact me, but I never was able to say that).

He says a Times reporter condemns his comments about puff pieces and that even other bloggers on the panel disagree.

Instead of sparking an intelligent debate I was roundly attacked. It’s the first time I addressed “real” journalists head on, and all I saw was fear, loathing and disdain.