One of the big news items this weekend had to be the story first broke by Om Malik that Mike Arrington had gone out and hired himself a CEO for his growing Crunch empire. This was followed shortly afterwards by the official announcement on the TechCrunch blog of the hiring of Heather Harde; soon to be ex-SVP of Mergers and Acquisitions at Fox Interactive Media, as the new CEO.

For a lot of people both in and out of the blogging world the very idea that a blog would even need a CEO is as Dave Winer said - “pretty amazing”. To think that  this so-called solitary profession could rise to the level of large networks that would need a corporate structure really is amazing and to a certain extent exhilarating.

Stan at FranticIndustries though suggests that this is really an expected course of events

Blog was always, and still is, a loosely defined category. It ranges from personal rants which were never meant for anyone to see except the blogger’s closest friends, to a full featured media publication, not all that different from NYTimes. Anyone who’s ever worked in a “real” newspaper knows that you need managers, marketing people, journalists, and editors to make it work. You can only go so far on your own.

Personally I think it’s great and congratulations to Mike on being able to do this. For me and I would think for many aspiring professional bloggers it shows that while there might be more than a few roadblocks in the way it is possible to be very successful as a blogger. It also is something that we can all point to when family, friends and other doubters call into question the validity of blogging as profession.

For that a big thanks Mike.

Conversation Tags: blogs, blogging, bloggers, TechCrunch, success