• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, September 16, 2011 12:07 PM

Had enough Michael Arrington for the moment? (A lifetime?) If not, you'll be happy to know that the TechCrunch founder is talking with Digits about his recent stafu with AOL. What do we learn from the interview? Not much, other than Arrington's claim that he very nearly stayed on at AOL. (AOL officially terminated its relationship with Arrington earlier this week, though it remains an investor in his new VC fund, CrunchFund.)

This past Saturday, "We got to a point where we agreed on the statement that I would stay with AOL and continue to write," he tells Digits. Arrington and AOL executives then began conceptualizing a blog post he would write announcing the news, but "there was a concern that we would 'reignite the flames' with anything I wrote," Arrington adds. "We just couldn't come to an agreement."

Meanwhile, Arrington said he was concerned to the end that he wouldn't "be able to write whatever I felt was true," which he believed meant that TechCrunch wouldn't have "real editorial independence." Score one for journalistic integrity.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »