The rebirth, kind of, of GigaOm

Laura Hazard Owen writes for Nieman Journalism Lab about how the tech news site GigaOm, which shuttered in March, is now back in business.

Owen writes, “In the meantime, there’s new content being published on Gigaom.com. I noticed a couple of frequent bylines: Tom Cheredar, formerly a media reporter at VentureBeat and media editor at The Daily Dot, and Nathaniel Mott, a former reporter at PandoDaily. Both said they couldn’t talk about Gigaom’s future plans. ‘I can tell you that Knowingly hired me last month as an editorial advisor to Gigaom, which includes having me ‘turn the lights back on’ by coordinating with a handful of freelancers to publish a few articles to the site during the weekdays,’ Cheredar told me in an email. ‘The site definitely hasn’t relaunched, as that would require having a staff of full-time reporters/editors.’

“So far, the posts being published to Gigaom are a mixture of embargoed product stories, takes on news, and long interviews by Reese. It’s tough to spot a unifying theme or worldview, which could make it hard for the site to compete as an actual destination on the Internet. I know that it’s early days (and, again, I’m 100 percent biased), but the new content on Gigaom lacks the spark and passion that, I think, kept people reading us in the past. Gigaom writers had spent years building their personal brands, and — I think, I hope — when they left, their followers went with them.

“Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a brand makes less of a difference now, since most people aren’t visiting individual sites anyway but are instead finding news through big platforms like Facebook.”

Read more here.