Crunchpad anyone? I found him too infrequent to be a major reason to visit the site. I suspect that most of the traffic hit techcrunch thanks to the endless link baiting of MG or popularity contest blather like their Twitter "coverage". Twitter used to be every other feature.

Other big winners were Sarah Lacy saying that old media is dead and no one wants to be a journalist at WSJ (how did that turn out btw) or other random bouts of idiocy (RSS is dead!)

Frankly, Techcrunch has long been a source of tech trolling. For trolls, by trolls. Its no wonder it went under - the sugar high simply ran out.

Absolutely, but you'll typically find huge eccentricities of character in someone capable of doing what Arrington did. I doubt you can separate his character from his results. He was like a pitbull latching on to the slightest hint of a scoop.