Pando failed as publication with last article from June and before that for a year or so all articles were written by Sarah so no money for journalists. It's not so much selling publication as selling web site with residual google traffic.
I am sad - I was subscriber at one time and attended a few events. Lots of good content a few years ago. Good journalism is expensive and Sarah failed to make finances at Pando viable. Now competition for subscriber dollars is intense with theinformation, business insider, digiday, etc and ad dollar will never support niche publication with no unique audience like Pando.
I'd dispute that. I followed for a few months but the incessant valley navel gazing dried up my interest pretty quickly. It wasn't a great publisher in the great scheme of things even with Lacey's TechCrunch credentials. And to be honest I'd also stopped reading TechCrunch et-al back around 2012/13 even before she left. Maybe at the age of 52 I've outgrown this kind of tech "journalism".
"An acquisition is always a failure" — Pando, 2013
"An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders."
Well, the tone of the Pando CEO’s sale announcement was almost of mourning.
While Lacy didn’t go so far as to talk about failure she does recognize, with regret, that she is no longer able to do her job effectively. I found the frankness very emotionally touching.
And what's wrong with failing? What's wrong with trying for years and years and then deciding not to pour your life into something? (It's not like she did it for three months and then decided to bail.)
I can't imagine selling was easy, but the wise course is not always easy.
(Note, you don't explicitly say that failing is bad in your comment, but that's the tone I took from it. If that wasn't what was intended, I proactively apologize.)
"As a founder, I have a personal goal that's just as important and just as core to our culture: I do not want to sell this company. [....] So let me put it this way: Selling is not success to me. If I wind up selling, I've failed in some way. We didn't get as big as we should, we didn't execute on the opportunity or I didn't hire the right team and got too burned out."
Sarah Lacy made it quite clear in the post that her heart was not in the game anymore, and that she had become as cynical as other bygone journalists. She isn't selling for money, she's selling because she doesn't want to do the work anymore. You can call that failure, but I would call it resignation.
> It’s a place where I’ve been sexually harassed more times than I can remember. It’s a place where I’ve been lied about, where VCs have arm-twisted editors to fire me, where billionaires have threatened those doing business with me to cut all ties. It’s a place where I’ve had people turn on me again and again and again simply for doing my job. It’s a place I’ve been betrayed by people I trusted. It’s a place where one-time friends threatened my children because I wrote about things they did.
Wow. I hope she writes a memoir of her time as a journalist. We need to hear what she has to say because this is a side that I have not yet experienced, and hopefully never will.
You sound surprised the rich and powerful are buddies who gang up on anyone who threatens their position!?
Harvey Weinstein and the tricks with his money and network he pulled is a current good example of this. But, it's been going on forever in every sector(tech to entertainment to etc) yet sometimes karma comes around and bites them accordingly.
I briefly tried following PandoDaily after Sara's public exit from Techcrunch, but it quickly got kinda... boring and pointless. Also, I recall there were way too many posts about themselves and their feuds and quarrels with people (It was years before Uber affair).
I think Pando really demonstrates how hard it is to make money in contrarian journalism. Not just investigative journalism, which is expensive, but it shows us the danger of going to market with a contrary voice.
The real money is media made amplifying corporate press releases and telling people that what they believe is basically correct. I miss the days when alcoholic, misanthropic reporters were the mainstay of newsrooms. They may have been SOBs, but we still need them.
We all say that we like to have our assumptions challenged, and many actually do, but it seems too few are willing to actually pay for it.
Pando failed cause it was a tad to much outrage spewing instead of more informative tone (though not like super outrage machines Buzzfeed or Breitbart)
Paul Carr was so incredibly negative it was just hard to read. There is a difference between being skeptical and calling out BS, and just being pure negativity 24/7.
This being said, its very hard do quality journalism and make money. I am glad they tried, there was some decent quality stuff.
So what happens when the time comes to call it quits on a "news website" business? How does the new owner drive traffic to a site when the articles are all old and out of date?
It's not like a web app of some kind that does a recurring business function (e.g. email subscriber management) so novelty doesn't matter, and new features are not needed every single day.
Haha, yeah, no shit she is quitting journalism. You come away from this article thinking they just sold the next Google, but as a simple look at the front page reveals, it's simply a failed media startup that was likely sold for no more than the domain name is worth.
No, BuySellAds is an independant ad network. They focus on helping publishers sell campaigns direct to advertisers with their platform and own a few different brands like Carbon Ads.
I always thought of it as the Ames/War nerd thing; everything else attached to it was pretty worthless. I don't recall them ever breaking a story, or publishing anything of note and won't miss them at all, as long as Ames republishes his work somewhere else.
It’s not significant, you’re not missing anything. Pando never really took off or did anything. It launched with a big boom because of the relationship with TC but never got any traction on its own.
A larger number of people than before learned it was mainly funded by U.S. government groups of the sort paranoids might worry about. They do it to help both our cops/spies and foreign dissidents in governments the U.S. targets. Then, other groups in U.S. government are opposed to it since it conceals the threats to us (Four Horsemen of the Infacalypse) or just them (i.e. whistleblowers). "Left hand, right hand" thing on top of Pando's drama-inducing presentation typical of media outlets.
Tor supporters' reactions to it were even more interesting than the article, though. It was quite a test of both their honesty and public relations.
"wondering why I should care" is at least passively a toxic comment. At least take the time to click on the link before making a comment like that. Or just ignore the article.
Assuming bad faith is more damaging to discussion than dismissiveness. Your using the word "toxic" to describe the comment is more toxic than the comment itself.
Ed: if you had led off with
> The sentence works without asking "why I should care?"
Ah who can forget Paul 'Genius Journalist' Carr that when the Snowden story was breaking was making fun of Ed and doing his best to downplay/bury the biggest story in years with an avalanche of bullshit. I also see that he wrote a book titled "Bringing nothing to the party: Confessions of a new media whore". That's one thing you got right, Paul.
Not surprising "pando" got sold to ad peddlers given the caliber of their editorial staff.
I am sad - I was subscriber at one time and attended a few events. Lots of good content a few years ago. Good journalism is expensive and Sarah failed to make finances at Pando viable. Now competition for subscriber dollars is intense with theinformation, business insider, digiday, etc and ad dollar will never support niche publication with no unique audience like Pando.