SAN FRANCISCO, 1:28 AM, MON MAY 12 | 1 POSTS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS | tips@valleywag.com | SUBMIT A TIP | RSS

Posts Tagged “Rafat Ali”

nerdfight

Rafat Ali's blogging hopes and dreams: to be as boring and profitable as Reed Elsevier

It takes a brave man to get in the middle of TechCrunch's bloggin' VC Michael Arrington and PaidContent founding editor Rafat Ali as they duke it out over the future of their micromedia empires. Timesman Saul Hansell is nothing but brave. In a Bits blog post, he quotes Rafat Ali's new hired hand Nathan Richardson saying that PaidContent differentiates itself from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider and our own Valleywag because it "has not gone down the road of following personal foibles." Then, towards the end of the piece, Ali himself suggeests that Arrington is thinking too small by gunning for CNET:
The big market for us is the trade media. Companies like Reed Elsevier, Nielsen, Incisive and Informa play in this market, not these blogs.
But are these publishers so evenhanded? Trade publications have a history of being self-interested boosters for the markets they cover. More »

3:40 PM on Fri Mar 28 2008
By Jackson West
415 views, 4 comments

Latest by Abhi2point0: Also, they're the only guys with presence in India ... probably the hottest (tech & media) startup country after the US and Israel.. contentsutra(dot)(com) is way better than any trade mag covering digital media in the subcontinent and does pretty good more »

hires

Rafat Ali confirms PaidContent moves, New York office

Confirming early reports, Rafat Ali posted the details of ContentNext Media's new hires, including the promotion of employee number two Staci D. Kramer (pictured, right) to co-editor and EVP and plans to lease space in downtown Manhattan, expanding the company's geographic footprint to the other coast from its current space in Santa Monica. Patrick Dignan (pictured, left) from Forbes will join new CEO Nathan Richardson in New York, and Charlie Koones (pictured, center), former president and publisher of entertainment trade Variety joins the board. Seems more and more execs are buying into Ali's belief that "in the near future, all media will be digital media."

5:00 PM on Thu Mar 27 2008
By Jackson West
278 views, Comment

hires

PaidContent blog network hires Dow Jones, Yahoo veteran as CEO

ContentNext Media, the parent company of blogtrepreneur Rafat Ali's media news site PaidContent.org has named former Dow Jones executive Nathan Richardson as the company's new CEO. He's pictured here in his days as general manager of Yahoo Finance. Most recently, Richardson has been doing volunteer work in Liberia for the International Rescue Committee. The move will free Ali from his role as CEO to focus on editorial duties. Look for the company to announce another senior-level hire by early next week. The move makes it clear that company is focused on continuing to grow independently — and Ali certainly won't be selling it to TechCrunch investor-slash-journalist Michael Arrington anytime soon. Update: More on the company's as-yet-unannounced moves after the jump. More »

9:54 PM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Jackson West
825 views, 2 comments

Latest by FiveStarEggRoll: I think he is trying to be politically correct by describing himself by displaying the "Loser L" for both normal and dyslexic readers. Harry "in after Persai" Wang (No, I am not any of those anti-Persai guys...hell, I have never even visited more »

blogging for dollars

Valleywag seeking $10 million among VC blog feeding frenzy

What is Michael Arrington smoking? His self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup. More »

11:51 AM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,671 views, 14 comments

Latest by VizionQuest: Perhaps he just worried about Valleywag's surge to dethrone TechCrunch: [tomuse.com] Keep up the great work! more »

nerdfight

Slide's funding brings out reporters' knives

Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding round. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek had more details of the $50 million round in an already-written column published to the Web after Swisher's post. Brad Stone of the New York Times weighed in that afternoon. And that's when the knives came out. More »

1:40 PM on Mon Jan 21 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,104 views, 6 comments

Latest by eze: i wouldn't count slide out so soon. nobody knows how much slide's widget/application empire is worth, because nothing like this has ever been done before. btw, if anyone in this comment section wants to try to compare facebook to friendster or more »

parties

"Does this bash make my bubble look big?" Expert advice on extravagant tech parties

PaidContent.org founder Rafat Ali threw an NYC media party last night to celebrate his blog's first investment round. The "guys in nametags making pitches" reminded media pundit Jeff Jarvis of the bashes of the dot-com boom. The Gawker Media overlords were bouncing biz-dev people back and forth like Web 2.0 ping-pong. "All the hookups had the blandness of lesbian sex," said one attendee. "Nobody has any money, so there's no penetration." More »

4:53 PM on Wed Jun 28 2006
By Nick Douglas
217 views, Comment