From the Columbia Journalism Review:
AllThingsD and the limits of the personal franchise news model
A few breakout stars don’t signal a general power shift in journalism
A couple of weeks ago, Felix Salmon asked:We seem to have an emerging meme.
“Can Rupert Murdoch hold on to Kara Swisher?”Well, now we have our answer. He doesn’t want to, at least at whatever price she was asking.
Last week, Dow Jones, a unit in Murdoch’s News Corp.’s empire, said it would not renew its contract with either Swisher or her partner, Walt Mossberg, founders of the very successful technology site and conferencing operation, AllThingsD.
This split had been brewing for a while. In February, Reuters reported that the AllThingsD team was in talks with Dow Jones to either extend or end the relationship. In August, Fortune reported that the AllThingsD team had hired an investment bank to find outside investors in case the talks didn’t work out.
The leaks accelerated discussion of what Jay Rosen correctly identified as “the rise of personal franchise site in news”—journalists who once would have been thought of merely as stars working for large news organizations now believed to be franchises in and of the themselves. Rosen included AllThingsD, along with Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Dealbook at the Times, Wonkblog, built around Ezra Klein at The Washington Post, Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight, late of the Times now at ESPN, MMQB, starring Peter King at Sports Illustrated, and Grantland, built around Bill Simmons, also at ESPN....MORE
See:
Media: It's the Talent, Stupid!
"Journalism: Go Longform or Go Home"
"Why Aren’t Top Journalists Rich?".
