New websites are launched every day -- most, it would appear, involving photos of cats in compromising situations. Sites with real impact potential pop up less often.
Yet three recent digital media launches -- Capital New York, D.C.-focused TBD.com and Yahoo’s Upshot, each rolled out within the span of a month -- have the potential to change the game by putting journalism first.
And each started by hiring some of the Web’s top editorial talent away from established players well ahead of their launch date.
The founders of Capital New York, New York Observer editors Tom McGeveran and Josh Benson, left the salmon-colored paper late last year to work on launching a sort-of digital culture sheet not unlike the Observer.
Capital opened for business in July with the tagline “This is How New York Works.” It’s already established itself as a must-read for its “contain magazine-quality journalism in a continuous format.”
The pair was able to lure Business Insider media editor Gillian Reagan as its founding editor, and tap into their former pool of Observer contacts as contributors.
Albritton Communications, which owns Politico and several Washington area propertiess, took a similar tact with TBD. Jim Brady, the former executive editor of the WashingtonPost.com, hired Erik Wemple, well-regarded former editor of the Washington City Paper, as TBD’s editor. TBD launched on August 9.
After coming over from Talking Points Memo, Yahoo News editor Andrew Golis was able to assemble a stable of bloggy thoroughbreds, including John Cook, Gawker’s investigative reporter; Michael Calderone, a veteran of the New York Observer and Politico; former Gawker editor/writer Brett Michael Dykes; former Newsweek correspondent Holly Bailey as senior political reporter; and former New York writer Chris Lehmann as its managing editor.
“We wanted to get a team of aggressive, Web-native reporters who could break news,” Golis told TheWrap.
(Golis hinted as much in January in a note soliciting Web talent on his personal blog: “As many of you know, I was recently hired by Yahoo News to build a network of news blogs. I’m looking to build a team of voracious news consumers with an eye for a good story angle and the ability to write in tight, engaging prose.”)
He added that the “excitement of a startup with (Yahoo’s) incredible resources, and the ability to reach a sheer audience of that size and scale” was a distinct advantage in attracting new media talent. (With roughly 42 million unique monthly visitors, Yahoo News is among the top three highest trafficked news sites on the Internet.)
The idea for the Upshot, Yahoo said, was to create an engaging channel of original news and leverage the portal’s massive audience the way Yahoo Sports first did.
“Yahoo Sports put the toe in the water with original content,” Yahoo News vice president Mark Walker said. “It became apparent that mere aggregation is not enough of a differential in the competitive marketplace.
