TechCrunch posts details of fired intern's mistake, and that's a mistake.

An intern at TechCrunch was fired for accepting a Macbook Air as compensation in exchange for a blog post. Michael Arrington, who runs the leading tech blog, made the decision to publicly post about this matter, in detail, "protecting" the name of the person in question, who might I add is underage. He deleted all of this person's posts on the site as well. You can read the article in question here.

This was a ridiculous thing to do on Arrington's part. Not only did this make it fairly easy based on comparing cached versions of the site to find out who it is, Arrington later decided to reveal the intern's identity once he came forward - after the damning article was posted.

I don't think this post should have ever been written. At private companies when someone loses their job, a general email is usually circulated stating the person is no longer with the company. In almost all cases the reason is not revealed, nor are the facts of whether the individual left of their own accord or were fired.

This posting does just the opposite, revealing everything that lead up to the individual's dismissal, while not implicitly exposing who it is. Now that he's been revealed, one has to wonder if the intern would have ever spoken about this publicly had it not been for the fact that:

a) Readers would not have to dig very deep to figure out whose posts are no longer there, combined with

b) Why exactly he was terminated has been made public

With both pieces of information tied to each other in a public forum, I have a feeling this intern (whose name I choose not to further promote here) only chose to come forward due to the inevitability of readers finding out not only that it was he who was let go, but also what he did.

In my opinion the right course of action would have been to bid him adieu internally, delete his posts and simply move on. Some people might have questioned why all his articles were now missing , but in that situation I believe it's the responsibility of Arrington to not only protect someone who did something wrong, but to protect the image of someone who is underage.

While the situation is serious from an internal standpoint, and while the intern made a mistake that cost him his job, the biggest mistake here comes on the part of Arrington: on one hand you have him chastising the poor judgement made by one of his interns, but then acquiescing to that intern's judgement call to reveal his identity.

If it was a poor judgement call for Daniel to take the Macbook to begin with, why would you encourage the decision he made to come forward? Then again, as stated earlier, the posting of this article to begin with made it pretty difficult for him not to defend himself.

This intern now has to go out into the world with a very public black mark on his record, due to the negative public perception he's been handed, and he's not even 18 yet. Good luck, kid.