November 27th, 2009, 9:26PM in Internet by Marc LequimeView Comments
Now I’m in an angry mood. And I was browsing my Technology section in RSS, and once again, more spammy irrelevant news that was posted in other sections hours ago. In fact, this particular story was over by the time Mashable posted it. And look at the DISQUS comments? Very few positive ones. And yet everyone seems to share the same idea – the website is losing it’s focus as an Internet news site. They’re trying to attract visitors with crap that doesn’t correlate to technology.
I’m not complaining… well, actually, I am. Too many internet news sites are falling to popular media, then becoming ‘just another news site’. It’s really quite a sad fate.
Mashable is normally a source for entertaining news about social media, but recently it’s been posting mainstream news.
What about you? What do you think about Mashable’s new aims?
Source:
Yeah, Mashable have actually lost the plot… What on earth does Tiger Woods have to do with tech or social media, i'm sticking to this blog!!!
Hey Marc,
Thanks for the feedback – always appreciated!
I'm always open to editors trying out different ideas with regard to coverage scope – you'll never grow unless you try new things, fail a few times, but also hit on some directions that work. I'd argue that Mashable isn't another tech blog, but actually created a new genre of social media blogs: we did that by not emulating people's current expectations of what a tech blog needs to be.
Nobody knows what the future looks like, but we're going to experiment and refine as we go. The story you mention was perhaps a bit jarring in contrast to our usual fare, I'd agree, but there's also a large sector of our audience who were very interested in the story (note the retweet count).
We keep a really close eye on the comments, of course, and adjust our course based on the reaction. Negative comments are not evidence that we need to stop experimenting, by the way, they're just indicative that a course correction is needed.
Thanks again for the feedback Marc! Have a great weekend
I never actually expected you to read this, but here goes.
I was just heavily disappointed in the fact that you've been posting up on modern news, and perhaps rather dignifying mainstream news from technology news (two seperate RSS feeds?) would be a clear-fire way to shoot for.
I'm impressed that you take harsh feedback so kindly.
pretty funny how ya threw this blog post into Mashable's wikipedia entry.
.. not that I disagree with you… but, it's funny that you did it.
bit of shameless advertising here and there never hurts, right? contributes to the article, too I guess. Although, it wasn’t actually me who added that.
thanks for directing my attention to this, I made the Pete Cashmore comments display again