Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
At BuzzFeed, a 32 percent miss in 2015 revenue and a halving of its 2016 revenue target, according to the Financial Times. At Mashable, a massive layoff after the company failed to sell itself. At Yahoo, an upcoming sale of its news-producing assets, portending great uncertainty for journalists employed there. At Medium, a new way…
Begin: WordPress Article Content After laying off staff in December as it shifted business models to find a sustainable operation, Dinner Lab has officially shut down, according to a blog post on the company’s site. Dinner Lab, like many startups, is facing a challenging environment for startups that lately have to find their way to…
Three-and-a half years ago a few of us came up with a novel idea; bring together random people, in an unconventional location, and give an up-and-coming chef a chance. The idea was meant to be pretty simple – give a newcomer, an underdog, someone that no one else believed in yet, a platform to showcase…
The latest startup to “catch Silicon Valley’s eye” is a company called Juicero that’s selling, essentially, a $700 Keurig for organic cold-pressed juice. Even though it offers the kind of overpriced, niche gizmo you’d find in a Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, the company is flush with $120 million in investment capital. Silicon Valley giants are betting…
paging_filter Spirited Media, which owns and operates the Philadelphia-based local news site Billy Penn, is eyeing Baltimore, Chicago or Pittsburgh as the company’s next news outpost, POLITICO has learned. In an interview with POLITICO conducted before the final cities were selected, Spirited Media founder and CEO Jim Brady said he was looking to launch a…
Video is sexy. Video is lucrative. Video works on both the big screen and the smallest mobile screen. Video is also very hard to do, extremely hard to scale and highly unlikely to be much of a lifeline for VC-addled publishers desperate for growth areas. Mashable, which laid off 30 staffers last week, is the…
It didn’t take a startling expose about mismanaged sexual assault claims for women to know that Uber is not the most female-friendly service in this, our sharing economy. But when BuzzFeed News got a hold of some leaked screen shots from Uber’s internal customer support interface, seeing the words “rape” and “sexual assault” appear more than 10,000…
paging_filter Online publishing start-up Slant News is shutting down, sources confirmed to POLITICO Media. The publishing platform, founded in February last year, paid freelance writers 70 percent of the advertising revenue generated by the articles that they wrote for the site. Slant was co-founded by Amanda Gutterman, the former special projects editor for The Huffington…
Photo Credit Henning Wagenbreth AT HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers…
By: Clare Rubin, Product Manager and Nick Grudin, VP of Partnerships Branded content was one of the first forms of television marketing, when soap operas were created and sponsored by brands in the 1930s. It evolved to product placement and sponsorships across TV and radio, and now includes digital editorial content that highlights a marketer’s…