Henry Blodget, the owner and editor-in-chief of "Business Insider" has told "Globes" that his business is not up sale. The US media reported that he had turned down an $100-150 million offer from AOL Inc.
"Don’t believe everything you read," Blodget said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos. "We're pleased at our opportunities, in both advertising and subscriber recruitment. If things go well in the coming years, we'll have an opportunity to become a big company."
"Globes": Would you sell for $250 million?
Blodget: "We're not for sale! If you were to offer me a quarter billion dollars, I'd tell you that I would think about it, and then I would say no."
You manage a very successful news site at a time when the media is struggling to survive. What's the secret of your success?
I think that the digital media is different from the print media, and that print is different from television. Newspapers think that digital is the same format, so it's possible to offer the same content and it will work. It doesn’t. We didn’t start as a newspaper or on television, but only digitally, and we tried to figure out what works, what information people want, which stories interested them, and how they wanted to consume this information. We listened to our readers."
What did you discover?
"As for topics that interest them - there are a lot of things and they constantly change. As for which stories they want to be told, a story in a newspaper is different from a story on television, and different from a story online. I'll give you an example: on digital, everything is very visual. You can take a lot of pictures and the readers will love it. A picture is worth a thousand words; it's fast, it's effective, it's easy to share. Many of our stories include a lot of video clips and pictures."
What do you advise newspapers struggling to survive?
"It's hard to do both print and digital. You have to have some separation, give digital freedom of action and continue to run with the marvelous newspaper because people still want to read them."
So you don’t think that newspapers will go extinct?
"Ah… I think that it will happen, but that it will take a long time. People my age who have read newspapers for 20-25 years still want to reach them. It will take 20 years for the newspaper to disappear."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 30, 2014
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