I am extremely happy and honored to greet Paid Content’s Rafat Ali tomorrow on the next installment of WatchMojo Live. Our first guest was Tech Crunch’s Erick Schonfeld.
When Rafat launched PaidContent.org in 2002, he pioneered a breed of media and information company that spawned a new generation of media publications covering the digital media, technology and marketing segments. After raising financing from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, Ali sold PaidContent.org’s parent company Content Next Media to The Guardian Group in 2008, continuing to stay one step ahead of the competition.
Tune in tomorrow at 3pm EST. If you have any questions you want me to ask him, please email me at ash [at] watchmojo.com.
With the announcement that GigaOm was hiring a COO, raising more money, I think it’s safe to say that 2007 will mark both the end and new beginning of blogs… as business.
Clearly, the number of blogs in high tech alone is numbing: Rafat Ali, Michael Arrington, Om Malik have clearly been joined by others in trying to usurp market share in tech reporting.
Technically, HipMojo.com is in that lot, too, though we don’t really want to be in the business of news reporting per se, and rather, try to offer commentary, analysis from the perspective of an insider. Think think-thank, with a vantage point, if I dare say that. I clearly see the need for these businesses to delineate editorial from business, as would any media company.
Anyway, this comes on the heels of PaidContent’s expansion into the UK, and Tech Crunch hiring a COO and being on the cusp of raising money too. There’s nothing wrong with these content sites raising money of course, the opportunity is huge and they’re applying pressure to traditional news and trade media publications. It’s just clear that when magazines such Business 2.0 are about to be kyboshed and these blog empires are expanding, the line between blog network and old media is pretty much dead. You can’t really get away with trying not to play by news reporting rules when you are, in fact, reporting the news and competing with news organizations. That applies here too, I have way too much inside information by way of being an executive that I don’t really feel I should disclose ASAP. Obviously it adds to the merit of some of the posts and what not, but as we grow, too, I realize that before you press publish, you have some ethical guidelines to abide by, and just because you’re on Wordpress, MovableType etc., does not mean you are above those rules.
Hence the 2007: Blogs - RIP; Long Live Blogs moniker.
PLAY
