AOL swallows TechCrunch -- but can they keep it down?

The aging 'Net relic snapped up rumor king TechCrunch. Will TC begin censoring itself to serve its new master's interests?

What do you get when you mix a tottering giant from the InterWebs' formative years with the new breed of post-first-ask-questions-later news blogs? We're about to find out, now that AOL has swallowed up TechCrunch.

Yesterday AOL chief Tim Armstrong announced the deal at TechCrunch's own Disrupt Conference, confirming rumors that -- interestingly enough -- originated not on TechCrunch but on GigaOm. The blogosphere has been thrumming with the news ever since.

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What do you get when you mix a tottering giant from the InterWebs' formative years with the new breed of post-first-ask-questions-later news blogs? We're about to find out, now that AOL has swallowed up TechCrunch.

Yesterday AOL chief Tim Armstrong announced the deal at TechCrunch's own Disrupt Conference, confirming rumors that -- interestingly enough -- originated not on TechCrunch but on GigaOm. The blogosphere has been thrumming with the news ever since.

[ Want to cash in on your IT experiences? InfoWorld is looking for stories of an amazing or amusing IT adventure, lesson learned, or war tale from the trenches. Send your story to offtherecord@infoworld.com. If we publish it, we'll keep you anonymous and send you a $50 American Express gift cheque. ]

According to TC founder and spokesmodel Michael Arrington, this won't change how his site operates. If anything, he's afraid TechCrunch might go overboard in criticizing AOL to make it seem more impartial:

Tim [Armstrong] told me ....it was important that we feel free to criticize AOL when we think they deserve it. And the agreement we signed with AOL fully reflects this. In particular, we used the Twitter document scandal as a test. If the same thing happens with AOL in the future, we should feel comfortable posting those documents. And in that unlikely event, we will.

The last thing we want to happen is to end up with same cuddly relationship that the Wall Street Journal has with its sister company MySpace, for example.

In the end, we'll probably have to create internal checks to ensure that we aren't more critical of AOL than we otherwise would be just to prove our editorial independence.

The problem with this argument? The AOL deal already has changed the way TC operates.

TechCrunch has built a reputation for publishing every rumor that crosses its transom, founded or otherwise, which means it has both broken some major stories (like Google buying YouTube) and completely intercoursed the pooch on others (like Google buying Digg).

As Arrington himself notes in that quote above, TechCrunch even published documents obtained from Twitter by a hacker. I can't think of any mainstream sites that would do something like that, because hacks like that are illegal, and publishing the material could be considered promoting illegal activity. (Being a lawyer, Arrington should know that, so one has to assume he just didn't care.)

It would seem TechCrunch doesn't considers itself bound by normal journalistic rules -- like staying within the law, naming its sources, confirming that anonymous sources don't have a vested interest in the deals they are leaking, and admitting when they get a story wrong.

So here's my question: Why didn't TechCrunch break the story about the AOL acquisition? They clearly had it first. The reason is obvious: Because publishing that rumor would very likely have soured the deal. This means the site is already censoring itself to serve its own -- and its new master AOL's -- interests.