Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic examines Wirecutter, a tech product site that the New York Times acquired in 2016.
Warzel writes, “By 2015, the Wirecutter brand was popular and lucrative enough—in four years, it had generated a reported $150 million in online transactions—that potential buyers came calling. In 2016, the site sold to the Times, as a service-y complement to the newspaper’s own journalism. It didn’t take long for Wirecutter staffers to realize that the Times’ ambitions for the site far exceeded Wirecutter’s own expectations of moderate, steady growth. According to multiple former employees, whom I am keeping anonymous because they still work in the industry, the Times’ leadership wanted the site to double the amount of content it produced in order to juice revenue. Those employees said Wirecutter’s top editors argued that the site’s business would not scale directly, because a minority of articles, many of them for big-ticket items such as appliances, generated the bulk of the company’s revenues. But the mandate remained: Wirecutter would need to double its staff and double its output.
“Asked about the strategic shift post-acquisition, a Times spokesperson connected me with Ben Frumin, Wirecutter’s current editor in chief, who told me that these changes had indeed been made, and that they were successful and for the better. He noted that the site has gotten substantially larger in recent years; according to Frumin, it has tripled the size of its audience and doubled its staff during his five-year tenure. The company has also expanded from a singular focus on product recommendations into broader areas of coverage such as digital privacy, environmental impact, and aging.”
Read more here.
