Jason Calacanis, the outspoken blogger and entrepreneur who ran AOL’s Netscape division, resigned on Thursday in the wake of the firing of AOL’s chief executive, Jonathan Miller, the New York Times reports.
Mr. Calacanis sold his company, Weblogs Inc., a network of blogs, to AOL last year and continued to run it from offices in Santa Monica, Calif. This year he took over Netscape.com, transforming it from a Web portal into a site that lets users vote and comment on news articles.
In recent months, Mr. Calacanis said he was considering leaving AOL to start a new company. His decision to resign was hastened by the news that Time Warner, AOL’s parent, had replaced Mr. Miller with Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group.
“I’m not inclined to start over with a new guy,” Mr. Calacanis said in an interview on Thursday. As for what to make of the treatment of Mr. Miller, who discovered he was being replaced after a reporter called AOL asking about Mr. Falco’s appointment, Mr. Calacanis said only: “I’m perplexed. Why now?”
On his blog (www.calacanis.com), Mr. Calacanis wrote a long entry on Wednesday praising Mr. Miller and calling it “a very sad day.”
