{"id":393,"date":"2006-06-26T10:11:09","date_gmt":"2006-06-26T14:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/06\/26\/om-and-rafat-are-the-future-of-news\/"},"modified":"2006-06-26T10:11:09","modified_gmt":"2006-06-26T14:11:09","slug":"om-and-rafat-are-the-future-of-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/06\/26\/om-and-rafat-are-the-future-of-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Om and Rafat are the future of news"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not much time to post today — in the middle of moving, which is not an easy thing with three daughters, two of whom are teenagers — but I wanted to take note of the Wall Street Journal article about bloggers finding financial backing<\/a>, and not just because it mentions my friend Om Malik, who was kind enough to come north to Toronto for mesh<\/a> even though he didn’t know any of us from Adam.<\/p>\n

The story notes that Om recently left Business 2.0 magazine to go full-time as a blogger and start what is likely to become a new media organization, and it also notes that Rafat Ali and the team at PaidContent also got financing<\/a> from long-time tech investor Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners. Rafat says they will be “hiring a journalist in NYC, starting our UK vertical, launching a redesign of all our sites, hiring more staff for operations and sales, bringing on interns, planning more industry mixers and developing conferences, starting our research arm, and more.”<\/p>\n

This is a nice counterpoint to Richard Siklos’s recent piece<\/a> in the New York Times, in which he talked about how minuscule new media ventures are compared with “old” media such as News Corp. — and there’s no question that the relatively tiny sums given to Om and Rafat (less than $1-million each) wouldn’t even show up on the books of a major media outlet. <\/p>\n

But I would argue that any media organization with brains should be paying close attention to what Om and particularly Rafat and his team are doing — it may sound apocalyptic, but PaidContent is the future of journalism in many ways. They are doing more enterprise reporting than lots of newspapers and magazines, and at one-tenth the cost. As Jeff Jarvis notes, from small seeds<\/a>. Cynthia Brumfield at IPDemocracy (another excellent site for news and commentary) compares it<\/a> to the early days of cable.<\/p>\n

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Not much time to post today — in the middle of moving, which is not an easy thing with three daughters, two of whom are teenagers — but I wanted to take note of the Wall Street Journal article about bloggers finding financial backing, and not just because it mentions my friend Om Malik, who … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Om and Rafat are the future of news”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}