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Fast Company used to be awesome to read back in the dot-com era, like an earlier version of TechCrunch (also formerly great). Back when the Internet was young a
by gunapologist99 4y ago
Fast Company used to be awesome to read back in the dot-com era, like an earlier version of TechCrunch (also formerly great). Back when the Internet was young and anything was possible.
What happened to these startup-covering sites? Where did they go wrong (or did they), and are there any replacements?
Are successive $100M Series Z rounds from PE funds somehow more interesting than pre-seed investments in scrappy startups?
- fullshark 4y agoMy guess is the economics of news on the internet were unknown at the time, so people invested in it (willing to eat losses in short term) thinking ad supported news could take off and paid for quality journalism. Now no one is that naive and we have just clickbait factories. Another possibility is due to success of newspapers, the craft of journalism was still known and practiced with skill, these days it's basically just fresh college grads without any on the job training cranking out stuff they read on social media and whatever a PR rep emails them that morning. But that's also related to the economics.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 4y agoI don’t know if it would have made a real difference in the end but in spite of some dissenting voices the news industry of the dot com era opened everything up and collectively decided they’d deal with the economics later.
- epc 4y agoThe same advertising apocalypse that wiped out the early dot coms took out most of the media covering technology (Internet World, Red Herring, etc). Fast Company and Wired went from 100+ pages to really, really thin magazines from 2000 to 2001. Given the combination of wide spread ad blocking and reluctance to pay for subscriptions, why would anyone set their money on fire to cover startups today?
- bombcar 4y agoEspecially when things like hacker news basically does it for free.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 4y agoNot really. Better in some ways, not so in others. Certainly more haphazard overall.
- ghaff 4y agoAnd really a lot of journalism generally. Lots of people here are very proud of all the ad-blocking tech they use and are happy with maybe dropping a few digital dimes on a substack or two. But people, including those who could afford to do so, won't pay for journalism for the most part.
- ailef 4y agoCan't really blame them given the abysmal quality of most reporting.
- ghaff 4y agoAnd it ends up being self-perpetuating. You mostly don't have newsrooms any longer and much of the reporting is being done by young people earning pennies. Which makes quality even worse, so less money for decent journalism, rinse and repeat. There is a fair bit of decent material out there but you have to seek it out to some extent. And most people still won't pay. You may not like The Economist for whatever reason but you can't really argue it's not good journalism.
- gorjusborg 4y agoCare to share what you consider decent sources?
- Justin_K 4y agoAgree with you. It turned into an "everybody can start a business" magazine to appeal to more readers. In the process, it lost it's luster.
- DonHopkins 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com