We Sold Pando

Pando failed as publication with last article from June and before that for a year or so all articles were written by Sarah so no money for journalists. It's not so much selling publication as selling web site with residual google traffic.

I am sad - I was subscriber at one time and attended a few events. Lots of good content a few years ago. Good journalism is expensive and Sarah failed to make finances at Pando viable. Now competition for subscriber dollars is intense with theinformation, business insider, digiday, etc and ad dollar will never support niche publication with no unique audience like Pando.

"An acquisition is always a failure" — Pando, 2013

"An acquisition, or an aqui-hire, is always a failure. Either the founders failed to achieve their goal, or – far likelier – they failed to dream big enough. The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders."

https://pando.com/2013/04/02/an-acquisition-is-always-a-fail...

> It’s a place where I’ve been sexually harassed more times than I can remember. It’s a place where I’ve been lied about, where VCs have arm-twisted editors to fire me, where billionaires have threatened those doing business with me to cut all ties. It’s a place where I’ve had people turn on me again and again and again simply for doing my job. It’s a place I’ve been betrayed by people I trusted. It’s a place where one-time friends threatened my children because I wrote about things they did.

Wow. I hope she writes a memoir of her time as a journalist. We need to hear what she has to say because this is a side that I have not yet experienced, and hopefully never will.

I briefly tried following PandoDaily after Sara's public exit from Techcrunch, but it quickly got kinda... boring and pointless. Also, I recall there were way too many posts about themselves and their feuds and quarrels with people (It was years before Uber affair).

I'm sad to see them go.

I think Pando really demonstrates how hard it is to make money in contrarian journalism. Not just investigative journalism, which is expensive, but it shows us the danger of going to market with a contrary voice.

The real money is media made amplifying corporate press releases and telling people that what they believe is basically correct. I miss the days when alcoholic, misanthropic reporters were the mainstay of newsrooms. They may have been SOBs, but we still need them.

We all say that we like to have our assumptions challenged, and many actually do, but it seems too few are willing to actually pay for it.

Pando failed cause it was a tad to much outrage spewing instead of more informative tone (though not like super outrage machines Buzzfeed or Breitbart)

Paul Carr was so incredibly negative it was just hard to read. There is a difference between being skeptical and calling out BS, and just being pure negativity 24/7.

This being said, its very hard do quality journalism and make money. I am glad they tried, there was some decent quality stuff.

> Thank you in particular to our amazing first amendment attorney, Roger Myers of Bryan Cave.

This is actually the most surprising tidbit to me. How in the world was Bryan Cave representing them without any conflicts of interest? They're huge!

For someone unfamiliar with Pando, what were their big scoops that brought such heat?

I wanted to check out BuySellAds but Ublock wouldn't let me.

Interesting parting shot: https://www.chairmanmom.com/about

So what happens when the time comes to call it quits on a "news website" business? How does the new owner drive traffic to a site when the articles are all old and out of date?

It's not like a web app of some kind that does a recurring business function (e.g. email subscriber management) so novelty doesn't matter, and new features are not needed every single day.

Haha, yeah, no shit she is quitting journalism. You come away from this article thinking they just sold the next Google, but as a simple look at the front page reveals, it's simply a failed media startup that was likely sold for no more than the domain name is worth.

How much did it self for? Did investors make money? Strange that this wasn’t commented on.

Only reason I remember Pando was from the War Nerd moving to that site. Though they hid everything behind a paywall, so I didn't stay for long.

Not the startup income pooling company for baseball players..

Never heard of Pando, wondering why I should care, if anyone could give brief insight into why it's significant?

Seems better to read the source blog post than BI's clickbait aggregation of it: https://pando.com/2019/10/23/we-sold-pando/

Ah who can forget Paul 'Genius Journalist' Carr that when the Snowden story was breaking was making fun of Ed and doing his best to downplay/bury the biggest story in years with an avalanche of bullshit. I also see that he wrote a book titled "Bringing nothing to the party: Confessions of a new media whore". That's one thing you got right, Paul.

Not surprising "pando" got sold to ad peddlers given the caliber of their editorial staff.

I read one of her books, it was bad.