Jason Calacanis used to be a good friend and a business partner with Mike Arrington. Together they launched a conference series but fell out and took different paths.

Jemima Kiss at Guardian.co.uk reports: Jason Calacanis: Revenge is a new editorial project to rival TechCrunch

Calacanis claims Arrington froze him out of his chunk of the TechCrunch 50 event, but rather than wage full-on warfare, Calacanis is retaliating by aiming to beat TechCrunch at its own game. Calacanis is launching his own startup editorial project – called Launch – and event as a direct challenge to TechCrunch, he told the Guardian.

…

He’s picked up on the state of the tech blogging scene which, he says, is in a race to the bottom and is dragging mainstream media down with it.

"When I started with Peter Rojas blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it’s even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

What the market needs, he says, is depth, knowledge and thoroughness.

An interesting tidbit in the story is that Mr. Calacanis doesn’t want to share brand with his writers.

"He wants his writers to file once a week under one collective voice, like the Economist."

That won’t work. The Economist gets away with it because it is The Economist and people in the know, know its writers.

The invisible writers on "Launch" won’t benefit much from the success of the publication. They won’t be earning much money because there isn’t much money in online media and they also won’t benefit from building a name for themselves – Mr. Calacanis wants all the brand equity to himself.

If Mr. Calacanis really wants to exact revenge on Techcrunch then he should recruit some the Techcrunch writers with recognizable names such as MG Siegler and Erick Schonfeld in the US, and Mike Butcher and Robin Wauters in Europe.

I doubt that these writers are tied up in lucrative inducements to stay at Techcrunch.

It would be a big blow to Techcrunch, and Mr. Arrington’s future payouts from AOL, if they were to leave. And they would leave with large audiences attached because of their personal brands.

[Cross-posted at Silicon Valley Watcher]