Ethical track record aside, players and coaches don't get to officiate games; active investors don't get a free pass to be journalists in the same space. He KNEW he'd have to leave TechCrunch for the fund. The rest is just posturing.
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Why? Om Malik is a partner in a venture firm[1] and still writes for GigaOm.
You don't have to obtain a license or agree to uphold any particular code of conduct to be allowed to write about news for the web. You just write, and if people value what you have to say, they read. Arrington even had signoff from the CEO of AOL saying he could do both.
That's not to say that Arrington is completely in the right in this. Many reasonable people seem to be worried about the conflict of interest, so there's a good chance that it's in AOL's interest to dispose of him to avoid worse PR. But I think he absolutely went into this thinking that he could keep doing TechCrunch.
Funny that you should post that on a news site affiliated with an investment firm.