Dear readers,
I met with the crew at fortune.com Thursday afternoon. They’re proud of the new site, but I think it’s fair to say they’ve got more work ahead of them. Here’s what happened:
As part of the great carving up of the media empire that was AOL/Time Warner, Time Inc. (the magazine company) is being spun off from Time Warner — as AOL and Time Warner Cable were before it.
And as part of the deal, Fortune‘s website, long a subset of CNNMoney, was relaunched as its own online property called simply, finally, fortune.com.
It had to happen eventually. But it happened on Sunday, just before the publication of the Fortune 500 — the magazine’s biggest issue of the year.
The next day, Apple (AAPL) staged what turned out to be most eventful WWDC in years, and we got a bit lost in the shuffle.
I say we, because this blog was always as much yours, dear readers, as mine.
Those of you who became regulars, I’ve been told, did so as much for what you learned from each other as what you learned from me.
I know it’s been hard since Sunday to find the site. The CNNMoney feed was shut off. The Yahoo link was broken. RSS got disconnected. DISCUS was replaced with livefyre, and livefire’s comment counter has been stuck on zero all week, even when there were dozens of comments.
I am assured that the things that can be fixed are being tended to, one bug at a time.
But some things can’t be changed so easily. DISCUS, which we loved to diss, is not coming back. And it doesn’t look like the comments we left there are coming back either. They belong to CNNMoney. Infinite scrolling is here to stay, at least for the time being. And the Apple 2.0 brand — which dates back to Business 2.0 magazine, where it made more sense — has been retired. Some have suggested renaming it Apple 3.0. I don’t know. My byline may have to be my brand.
The good news is that the fortune.com team is committed to making the site easier to find and participate in. And they’re open to suggestions about how to do that.
I’ve given them some ideas, but they want to hear yours.
You can leave your comments below — just click on the 0 Comments icon and register. Not exactly intuitive, but it works.
If you’d rather make suggestions more privately, you can write me at ped@mac.com. I hope you do.
For the time being, you can go directly to my stuff by bookmarking this address: fortune.com/author/philip-elmer-dewitt. My most recent post will fill most of the page and the column on the left will list my previous articles in order (scrolling is slow, but they should all be there eventually).
I hope you’ll be patient while the kinks are being working out. And I hope you’ll stick around.
