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New York Times Buys The Wirecutter For $30 Million (recode.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Recode: The New York Times is buying The Wirecutter, a five-year-old online consumer guide. The Times will pay more than $30 million, including retention bonuses and other payouts, for the startup, according to people familiar with the transaction. Brian Lam, a former editor at Gawker Media's Gizmodo, founded The Wirecutter in 2011, and has self-funded the company's growth. The Wirecutter provides recommendations for electronics and other gadgets that are both obsessively researched and simply presented. The Wirecutter also owns The Sweethome, which takes the same approach for home appliances and other gear. "We're very excited about this acquisition on two fronts," said Mark Thompson, CEO of The New York Times Company, in the acquisition release. "It's an impressively run business with a very attractive revenue model and its success is built on the foundation of great, rigorously reported service journalism." The Wirecutter tweeted earlier today: "Hey, we're still us. But we're a part of The New York Times now."
I personally liked Wirecutter's review style. Notably, you can find what they recommend with a link to buy it if you're in a hurry. They always have a section where the review goes over their credentials. They list all the comparable products they tried. They review things that other sites don't review, the general theme of the site is "consumer goods that a millennial has got to have".
I'm sure I'm going to get plenty of posts slamming them and claiming bias or how they often recommend something that is more expensive than the cheapest possible item you can buy that does the same thing. They absolutely do consider cost, unlike sites like wired, and usually they recommend the product that they feel offers the best bang/buck.
Anyways, they were good. Will The Times screw them up? Maybe. Maybe all the review staff will have to move into cubicles in some mammoth office building owned by NYT. Maybe they'll get treated a lot worse and they'll be forced to compromise their ethics to just collect as much cash as possible to boost a CEO's quarterly profits. Then again, maybe not. The Times bought five thirty eight, and I can't detect any significant downgrade in the site.