We’ve had a growing feeling for a while that we should change direction. Since first writing about the technological transformation of the media in 2001, a lot has happened.
Devices that were just theoretical in the early days have now been launched and are in daily use for some people. We’re proud that we’ve mapped this, helping people by anticipating the impact of these changes both in their personal lives, but also for the media industries, building a strong global readership along the way.
Time for a change
That aside, it feels like a change is needed .
Other publications have massive backers and frankly we just can’t compete with their huge budgets – by way of example, having pioneered coverage of European trade shows (we started reporting from there when they weren’t even speaking English!), we found that we’re not able to compete with the vast teams that publications like Engadget are now sending to those shows.
Despite strong competition, we still broke stories that ended up going worldwide, the rise of behemoths like Engadget and Gizmodo, with 20+ journos on the team, the writing is on the wall for us.
Goodbye global – Hello local!
We’ve made the decision of change our focus so, Goodbye global – Hello local!
By way of an extreme contrast, we’re going to focus our attention on the relatively tiny Isle of Wight.
We really think that local news is an area that holds a lot of interesting potential. We see it as an opportunity to rebuild trust in local news reporting. Our site is VentnorBlog. It’s been running for a while, but we’re taking it to the next level and will see what we can do in the local news space.
Image: squacco under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license
We wrote this at the time, but got distracted for various reasons, we didn’t publish it, so are publishing this after the fact – Simon