MediaFile

From the TechCrunch conference in San Francisco, this post is brought to you by Alexei Oreskovic and Sarah McBride:

Michael Arrington, one of the most high-profile figures in the world of tech blogging, has lost the TechCrunch soapbox he built. But he’s found a new way to get his point across: T-shirts

Arrington took the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Monday, moments after parent-company AOL announced that he was no longer part of the company due to his new role heading up a $20 million venture capital fund.

“It’s no longer a good situation for me to stay at TechCrunch,” Arrington said, calling it a sad moment for him and promising to get the controversy out of the way at the start, to avoid distracting from the 3-day conference in San Francisco.

True to form, the pugnacious Arrington unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a t-shirt with the words “unpaid blogger” printed in large letters, a jab at AOL/Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington, who had insisted that Arrington was no longer an AOL employee after news of his VC fund surfaced.

“That’s what I’m down to: making statements on fucking T-Shirts. That and Twitter,” Arrington said later, during an on-stage interview with Linked-In co-founder Reid Hoffman.

 Hoffman, an investor in the fund, said earlier comments he had made about the connections between the fund and TechCrunch’s closeness to start-ups were interpreted too broadly. “I don’t have any doubts about yours or TechCrunch’s integrity,” he said on stage.

“That’s why I’m tired of the press,” Arrington said.