Australian Politics

@paulwallbank @franksting @unionagainstdhmo @firstdogonthemoon @stilgherrian @mpesce Crikey/Private Media really could (and probably should) be a much bigger company than it is, just it's been really horrendously managed.

Hopefully Will Hayward is doing a better job, because many of his predecessors have left a lot to be desired.

For most of its life, Private Media barely turned a profit, and that's been with Crikey subscriptions and SmartCompany basically carrying the various other websites that have come and gone over the years.

Many talented young journos have worked there, only to move on to the Nine newspapers or the ABC after a year or two.

You had the former CEO who one day was running cables through the ceiling of the old offices next to the Immigration Museum.

You had the other former CEO who loaded the organisation up with sales staff, only for them all to be made redundant within six months.

You had ideas that could have made money (spin out Patrick Stafford's SmartCompany tech newsletter into its own small business tech publication) knocked back, while vanity projects with no business model (remember Paul Barry's Power Index?) got the green light.

At one stage, Crikey used a heavily hacked WordPress as its content management system. SmartCompany and LeadingCompany used Joomla!, and StartupSmart used FlexiContent. All self-hosted out of a Port Melbourne data centre.

Despite owning a digital media company, the people in charge at the time didn't know enough about digital tech to know what a massive resource black hole this was.

(Eric Beecher had to bring in consultants to tell him!)

I could go on...

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