Remember Sugarstring, the Verizon-backed “news” site?
It’s dead.
Here’s Verizon’s statement to DSL Reports:
As you know, we’ve always said this was a pilot project; and as with any pilot project, we evaluate, take our learnings, improve our execution and move forward. That’s what we’ve decided to do here.
via The Verge
T.C. Sottek at The Verge:
For now, it’s easy to shrug off Sugarstring as just another hilariously dumb attempt to make a corporate brand look cool. Its format is somewhere between Digg, BuzzFeed, and Verizon’s corporate blog. It appears to gather much of its content from Reddit. It’s powered by Wordpress. It inexplicably has 74,000 Twitter followers. It publishes headlines like “Can you survive without chatting at work?” and “Three reasons Neil DeGrasse Tyson is wrong about innovation.”
Verizon is getting into the news business. What could go wrong?
The most-valuable, second-richest telecommunications company in the world is bankrolling a technology news site called SugarString.com. The publication, which is now hiring its first full-time editors and reporters, is meant to rival major tech websites like Wired and the Verge while bringing in a potentially giant mainstream audience to beat those competitors at their own game.
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Jim Dalrymple:
It’s very sad. Glenn is a great guy and friend, but I understand the issues of being an independent publisher on Apple’s Newsstand—it’s not fun. Apple should just admit that they don’t give a shit about digital magazines and be done with it.
I couldn’t agree more; Newsstand should go away, and digital publications should be normal apps that can live right on the SpringBoard, not hidden behind a terrible icon and UI that only adds confusion.
Glenn Fleishman:
My labor of love the last two years has been The Magazine, first as its hired hand and then, in May 2013, as its owner. The sad truth has been that, while profitable from week one, the publication has had a declining subscription base since February 2013. It started at such a high level that we could handle a decline for a long time, but despite every effort — including our first-year anthology crowdfunded a bit under a year ago — we couldn’t replace departing subscribers with new ones fast enough. We’re a general-interest magazine that appeals to people who like technology, and that makes it very hard to market. “Pivoting” to a different editorial focus would have lost subscribers even faster.
The Power Slider, over on The Verge:
Before there were tech web sites there were magazines. Once a month you’d get a new one and read it cover to cover, including all the ads, trying to glean as much information as you could. I remember scouring issues of MacUser before buying my first PowerBook, trying to decide which model was exactly right for me. I must’ve read that article fifty times.
John Siracusa discusses his OS X reviews.
Dan Monk:
The deal calls for Milwaukee, Wisc. –based Journal Communications Inc. to merge its 13 television stations and 35 radio stations into Cincinnati-based Scripps. Both companies will spin off their newspaper assets into a new publicly-traded company, Journal Media Group.
The deal is subject to the approval of shareholders and regulators. It is expected to close in 2015.
Big news in the journalism world, but no one else will notice the re-arranged deck chairs.
Walt Hickey at FiveThirtyEight:
FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey Audience ran a poll from June 3 to 5 asking 1,129 Americans which camp they fell into, and wouldn’t you believe it? We’re split on that comma.
We asked respondents which sentence was, in their opinion, more grammatically correct: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind and loyal.” Or: “It’s important for a person to be honest, kind, and loyal.” The latter has an Oxford comma, the former none.
Scot Finnie:
On June 23, we will publish the last print issue of Computerworld.
It was 47 years ago, almost to the day, that Computerworld’s very first issue rolled off the presses: June 21, 1967. The newspaper’s first publisher was the late Patrick J. McGovern, who was the founder and chairman of International Data Group (IDG), Computerworld’s parent company.
It’s sad to lose anything that has endured so long. But we are merely taking part in the natural evolution of the media industry, like so many great publications before us. Trains, after all, were once powered by coal and steam; Computerworld is moving from paper to electrons.
It’s not hard to look at The New York Times’ and wonder what the newspaper’s leadership is doing on the digital front. This 96-page internal report is a hard look at the company’s missteps in the online arena. It’s a fascinating read.
via Vox