gigaomGigaom is shutting down.

The company made the announcement on Monday night with a statement on its website.

Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. All operations have ceased. We do not know at this time what the lenders intend to do with the assets or if there will be any future operations using those assets. The company does not currently intend to file bankruptcy. We would like to take a moment and thank our readers and our community for supporting us all along.

I frequented Gigaom often. I followed their writers on Twitter and enjoyed their perspective when it came to the digital world. The reporters were smart and contained more knowledge about topics that I could ever hope to hold.

They even inspired at times. In 2013, I attended paidContent Live, a Gigaom event. I loved it. There were smart, funny people on the panels and in the audience. But more importantly, I left that conference feeling invigorated. I had ideas, purpose, and wanted to share them with the world.

Being a bit of a cynic, it takes a lot elicit those types of feelings but there I was floating down the streets of NYC thinking of ways to conquer the digital publishing landscape.

I’m certainly disappointed about the news, and I hope that the women and men of Gigaom land on their feet soon.

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Editor. Writer. Social media specialist. Reader. Video game player. Sports lover. Card Collector. "I used to be a library junkie with books piled on my nightstand. I’d be constantly renewing books until I finished all of them. There had to be a way to escape the clutter. That’s when I discovered e-book apps for my old Blackberry. I bought plenty of books and read and read and read. I even developed what I called ‘Blackberry Eye,’ small wrinkles under my eyes from staring down at my phone all day."

1 COMMENT

  1. Sad. We’re deep into a era of ‘creative destruction’ in the news industry that may not always be creative in its impacts. It can strike seemingly at random, as with Gigaom.

    Outside BBC-like countries where the government forces people to pay for an official news source, news gathering and dissimilation has been paid for mostly by an advertising scheme where advertisers had little means of knowing what impact their ads had. One result was often that they over-advertised just to be safe. Think of all the silly jingles on 1960s TV ads.

    With web technologies, it has gotten much easier to target ads for particular audiences and to measure their results. No clicks on a website’s ads, no income for the website. It has become a cold, cruel world.

    On the other hand, it does mean not only richer and more varied news sources but a much more competitive market. News sources that prove wrong—most of the cable news coverage of recent presidential campaigns—get discredited and viewers move elsewhere. That’s why Fox News often has more viewers on some evenings than all the other cable news networks combined. Unlike them, it never succumbed to Obamania. It isn’t responsible for those now suffering from voter’s regret.

    In the 1960s, it was said that what constituted “news” in American was what Walter Cronkite liked when he read the NY Times. That may have bee true. As a kid, I listened to shortwave radio and I recall being disgusted that a Voice of America newscast I heard one evening not only had exactly the same stories I’d heard just minutes earlier on CBS, it broadcast them in precisely the same order. I don’t like lock-step thinking like that.

    Lock-step thinking is less common in today’s news and is less likely to become even less so in the future. That is a plus. To little diversity in the news is usually a prelude to disaster.

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