CBS, the media conglomerate, are verging on irritating me.
They’ve effectively just killed CNET through a disastrous corporate decision, effectively killing the impartiality of the organisation.
When high profile journalists quit, citing that their impartiality has been called into question, and the Editor-in-chief explains the incident in an statement using the line:
I could have quit right then.
You know the end is nigh.
CNET has had a good run. Arguably too much of a good run, but it’s purchase by CBS has clearly been a turn for the worse – that’s not reflecting on the journalists, but the suits at corporate.
As a business, they may be financially more successful, who knows, but as a business where the readers are the product, and where the readers value the balanced and honest reporting that they’re known for, they have no future. I hope there are enough up and coming publications for everyone to jump ship to – those guys have families and children – and CBS’s streisand-blindness could make it a chilly spring for those guys.
But that’s not all.
CBS also bought Last.fm a few years back. Since that point, Last.fm has declined in its startup-like quicky culture, CBS have messed around with well loved features and launched moronic ‘non-sites’.
This culminates in an announcement, a few weeks back, that today, Last.fm will turn off it’s radio support for a variety of countries, and will force users to subscribe to listen on their desktop.
Essentially the message they’re giving out:
As the market changes, we may once again be launching streaming services in more countries. If you would like to know when we bring a service to your country, let us know using the form below.
is a great big corporate “you are the product, you are no longer needed”, presumably from finance at CBS.
I like Last.fm‘s product, and I used to like the company. But there are lot’s of music sites out there, many of them legal, various of them not-so-much.
Do I have to support CBS to listen to interesting music? Can I find a different ways to fill my ear with interesting sounds in a variety of genres? I guess it’s now time to look at we7, Grooveshark, Deezer, The Hype Machine can offer.
CBS’s digital strategy seems to be mainly a combination of shooting themselves in the foot and killing their communities.
It must be touch, because they’re following the footsteps of various other organisations – remember when AOL killed Techcrunch in similar moves (ironically well-reported by CNET) or when Slashdot’s oft-derided “Corporate Overloads” jumped the shark and launched the most pointless microsite ever “SlashBI”.
There’s one media conglomerate that owns a web 2.0 site and hasn’t killed it yet. In fact the startup culture, and founder’s values at reddit.com have propelled it to 97,000 views per day, ranking the site 138th on the internet. As media conglomerates go, Conde-Nast owns Glamour, Vanity Fair and various other glossy magazines, and so Reddit isn’t an obvious fit, yet apparently the corporate team at Conde-Nast “get it”.
Whilst CBS noisily helps its subsidiaries self-destruct, I hope Conde-Nast silently lets Reddit do it’s own thing.
