Tech start-ups are fishing vets from old media. And old media vets are biting.
At first glance, it all makes sense. Leave the broken, somewhat depressing world of media for the fertile and more exciting soils of a start-up. A chance to build something while old media burns to the ground.HT: The Poynter Institute's "Bloomberg News’ parent will invest in startups" although I think Abnormal Returns had it first.
Tech’s forays into editorial ventures have seduced their fair share of well-established journalists. In 2011, Flipboard hired Time and Fortune veteran Josh Quittner as editorial director. Twitter poached Mark Luckie from the Washington Post as its manager of journalism and news. Tumblr made news in 2012 hiring away Blackbook’s Chris Mohney and Newsweek’s Jessica Bennett as the social network’s editor in chief and executive editor. And just last week Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa announced his departure from Reuters to join up with Circa, a young mobile-focused app for breaking news.
For Dan Lyons, a veteran of Forbes, Newsweek, and the former editor of ReadWriteWeb, that concern for the future of media, combined with a nagging curiosity, was enough for him to make the jump to HubSpot, a popular marketing start-up this past March. “I’ve been covering tech for a long time and really wanted to see what it’s like to work inside one of these companies,” he told BuzzFeed.
The latest crop of editorial tech hires are far from the first to cross the gulf, but the growing frequency suggests a new threat to media organizations: the loss of their most digitally savvy employees to the Facebooks and Circas of the world.
The transition hasn’t been seamless for every hire, and sometimes what seems like a natural progression doesn’t stick. Facebook’s first managing editor left his post last month, telling reporters that the company “doesn’t need reporters,” and in April, Tumblr’s yearlong experiment with an editorial team ended with a series of unceremonious layoffs. It’s an unsettling prospect for journalists who are jumping from a floundering industry into an ill-fitting role....MORE
There is quite a bit of trepidation in the Journalism biz, and a lot of flailing.
The Annenberg School is writing stuff like "The New Storytellers: With journalism startups springing forth, new business models are being tested"; Nieman Journalism Lab tries the similar "Across the world, money to support journalism startups comes from a variety of sources" with 69 case studies.
PBS' MediaShift chimes in with "Journalism Schools Become Incubators for Media Startups, Entrepreneurs"
As an outsider I've got to say it all seems so lame.
But hey, if they've read this far, I'm sure that our journo friends are wondering who the hell I think I am and concurring with the simple message conveyed by Fred Rogers:
You can probably tell that everything I know about the scribbler's art I learned from Party Like a Journalist .
