VentureBeat Replaces Retired SiliconBeat
Posted on September 2, 2006
Matt Marshall is replacing the popular SiliconBeat blog with a new blog called VentureBeat. SiliconBeat was published by the Mercury News. Marshall will be on his own now at VentureBeat but he has cut a syndication deal with the Mercury News. Marshall's launch post can be found here.
My Mercury News colleague Michael Bazeley and I launched SiliconBeat.com almost two years ago, in an effort to respond to the new reality of online media. The blog began as an experiment, taking up an hour or so of my day. Soon, it became much more: Baze and I found ourselves spending several hours daily on a blog that was supposed to be outside of our day jobs at the Merc. Baze, showing more sanity, pulled back from SiliconBeat and has taken a job managing the Mercury News' Web site. For me, SiliconBeat continued as a labor of love, a way to filter the goings-on of this fascinating place we call Silicon Valley. Yet I was doing too much. So I approached the Mercury News, and told them I wanted to go out on my own.VentureBeat suffered a crash shortly after launching but they appear to be running smoothly now. Former FT reporter Tom Foremski at Silicon Valley Watcher has more details about Matt Marshall's move to become an independent journalist and publisher of his own website.To my delight, the Mercury News has become my first customer. It will syndicate the content I produce here. It has the right to run it in the paper, and to put it on their Web site. For me, it is a great deal. The Merc is the valley's paper of record. It is my first read in the morning, and what I do here at VentureBeat is linked with the Merc's mission. Like most of the people at the Merc, I care about the community in a broader sense. That is why I'm covering things from a geographical standpoint, as opposed to an industry niche.