Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome had the plan to “deliver high-qualty, non-local content” to all of the company’s newsrooms, but after two years it’s been canceled partly to cut costs and party because “local is where it’s buttered”, Digital First’s chief executive John Paton told The New York Times. 

The fall back to a focus on local news is a 180 from the original plan, which will cause more than 50 people to lose their jobs. Digital First’s owner is the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.

This makes me wonder about how news projects judge their success. How do they know when it’s time to call it quits?

I ask this because Steve Buttry, soon-to-be former digital transformation editor at Project Thunderdome told The New York Times that while he knew it was a high risk going into the project, it was hard to tell whether it’s strategy was working “because they didn’t let it play out.”

Instead of canceling the project, should they have tried to change their strategy or at least saw the original one through? I don’t think two years is a very long time for something like this to take off. There are so many media and journalism outlets popping up, and they are all so new that it will be a while before we can determine whether they’ll stay.

It’s because it is not up to some of these experiments whether they should try to stick around; it’s up to whoever is funding them.

The Times article mentioned that there is a growing belief that being owned by wealthy individuals like Jeff Bezos is better than private equity firms or hedge funds, and I think I’m starting to see why.

The individual owners can do what they what with their money. If they want to see if if something succeed they can keep trying and put more money into it.

Private firms or hedge funds are likely to be only concerned with the business. It there’s no profit right away, they’re going to back out. They can’t waste time and money on a chance for too long. Money is their business, not news.

So the answer to my first question is, of course, money. I just can’t help but wonder if the demise of news experiments by their investors has us missing out on some great outlets, but I guess we’ll never really have the chance to find out.