By Seth Fiegerman, mashable, Tuesday 7 May 2013
One of the most talked about companies for online news right now isn’t a journalism outlet or a media conglomerate, but rather a small startup incubator and investor located in the heart of Manhattan’s meatpacking district.
“I think you can redefine a media company for this century,” Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Mashable in an interview. “We are trying to do that from the ground up.”
He eventually settled on a few fundamental principles for such a company: It would be data-driven. It wouldn’t need to own all the expensive assets that traditional media corporations do. It would be more focused on distribution, but not tied to a particular method of distribution. It would be, as he puts it, a “loose federation of pieces.”
If you look at the companies Betaworks is currently developing or has large stakes in, you’ll notice a suite of media consumption products, like Digg and Instapaper, as well as the recently launched Tapestry, which aims to create a better reading experience for short stories, and the soon-to-launch Google Reader alternative, not to mention other products in the pipeline.
Borthwick refers to each of these as pieces of a puzzle, which collectively solve that question of creating a 21st century media company.
At the center of all that is Digg, which Borthwick says is the heart of Betaworks’ media ecosystem — at least for right now — in the same way search is the heart of Google’s ecosystem.