New York Times Buys The Wirecutter For $30 Million (recode.net) 40
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter, a five-year-old online consumer guide. The Times will pay more than $30 million, including retention bonuses and other payouts, for the startup, according to people familiar with the transaction. Brian Lam, a former editor at Gawker Media's Gizmodo, founded The Wirecutter in 2011, and has self-funded the company's growth. The Wirecutter provides recommendations for electronics and other gadgets that are both obsessively researched and simply presented. The Wirecutter also owns The Sweethome, which takes the same approach for home appliances and other gear. "We're very excited about this acquisition on two fronts," said Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times Company, in the acquisition release. "It's an impressively run business with a very attractive revenue model and its success is built on the foundation of great, rigorously reported service journalism." The Wirecutter tweeted earlier today: "Hey, we're still us. But we're a part of The New York Times now."
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Apparently the Slashvertisement organs are still functioning within normal limits.
Good news for the founders, I liked the site (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally liked Wirecutter's review style. Notably, you can find what they recommend with a link to buy it if you're in a hurry. They always have a section where the review goes over their credentials. They list all the comparable products they tried. They review things that other sites don't review, the general theme of the site is "consumer goods that a millennial has got to have".
I'm sure I'm going to get plenty of posts slamming them and claiming bias or how they often recommend something that is more expensive than the cheapest possible item you can buy that does the same thing. They absolutely do consider cost, unlike sites like wired, and usually they recommend the product that they feel offers the best bang/buck.
Anyways, they were good. Will The Times screw them up? Maybe. Maybe all the review staff will have to move into cubicles in some mammoth office building owned by NYT. Maybe they'll get treated a lot worse and they'll be forced to compromise their ethics to just collect as much cash as possible to boost a CEO's quarterly profits. Then again, maybe not. The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.
Re:Good news for the founders, I liked the site (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard to say what will happen, but surely this election season the NYT didn't even make a pretense of objectivity. (I'm no Trump fan, but I don't want to read editorials thinly disguised as news stories. I don't even read the NYT directly but our local Honolulu paper runs their articles all the time.)
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Funny how both side no longer report the news but create editorials thinly disguised as news stories. Doesn't matter what news you get your news from. They all lean to one side or the other.
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True enough, it's not like Fox News is any better.
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They sure weren't objective in the Sanders/Clinton primary race. The cheerleading for Clinton was palpable.
I think a columnist somewhere should have taken up the Trump mantle and said "Ok, he's incoherent, but this is what he's trying to advocate if you get past the insults and bravado", with the idea that he was attracting support because people were more or less decoding what he had to say, and that somewhere there were some ideas.
What I wonder, though, is if someone more reasonable acting could have run
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The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.
FiveThiryEight is an ESPN site now... has been for over two years.
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> The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.
That's not the only thing you can't detect: ESPN has owned FiveThirtyEight since 2013.
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Except, yknow, the NYT has proven itself utterly ethically bankrupt repeatedly over the last few years and Wirecutter is probably going to wind up being nothing more than native advertising now.
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The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.
As a few others have already pointed out, it was ESPN, not The Times, that bought the FiveThirtyEight blog, so I won't belabor that point. What no one else has mentioned so far, however, is the reason you might be confused.
Back in 2010 (prior to ESPN purchasing FiveThirtyEight in 2013), The Times reached a deal to license FiveThirtyEight's content for publication. As a result, FiveThirtyEight content appeared on The Times' site, so it may have appeared that they were bought out. I seem to recall various blo
The eleventh page view used to cost $35 (Score:2)
The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.
Other than that the eleventh page view each month cost $35 for a digital subscription to NYTimes.com. Only when Disney bought it did the paywall drop. And I find Disney charging less for something to be unusual.
Nice website (Score:1)
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He later apologized and it looks like Steve Jobs forgave him (from Isaacson's biography).
New to me (Score:2)
Content vs Eyeballs (Score:2)
I'm not familiar with the website in question and know nothing about it besides the description given to it in the Slashdot summary. But assuming it is even marginally accurate, I stand in saddened awe that a site which actually produces moderately interesting content ("recommendations for electronics and other gadgets that are both obsessively researched and simply presented") is purchased for a mere $30 million while something like Facebook or Twitter - which are blank slates filled with user-created nons
Where can I get wirecutters sharpened??? (Score:2)
Equipment like this one http://www.directindustry.com/... [directindustry.com] tend to be quite expensive. Have the times figgered out what they will do with the wirecutter becomes dull?
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Mixed feelings (Score:1)
Given how the NYT says nothing when David Pogue freely accepts perks and free stuff from the companies he reviews, there is no pretense whatsoever of impartiality or objectivity. Pogue doesn't actually even work FOR the Times; he's a 1099 contractor and free to do as he pleases. And he does. And as a result, I can't trust that anything he says isn't something he is being paid to say by a supplier or vendor.
So along comes Wirecutter, which seems to take the opposite approach where they seem to care about
A real timesaver for overthinkers (Score:2)
I love the Wirecutter and the Sweethome. I tend to spend an unnecessary amount of time researching certain products, so having these "The Best" sites really cuts down on my research time. Even if I don't go with their pick, the articles themselves are very informative for the subject at hand, telling you what to look for, what features are important/not important, etc., which helps in ensuring my money is spent more wisely. The wife and I have quite a few of their picks around the house and we're pretty hap
"Best SSD" is an evo??? (Score:1)