Tech journalist and entrepreneur Paul Carr’s last venture was surprisingly old-school. NSFW Corp, a news site that billed itself as 'the Economist written by the Daily Show', put out a print magazine – and it even put up a paywall. Despite winning fans, it didn’t make money. Now Carr and co are off to join tech blog PandoDaily, a move likely to be met with applause and snickers in the incestuous world of tech hackery.
Carr, a former Guardian columnist, has made a reputation as one of the feistiest writers on the tech beat. His Twitter spats are legendary, as are his bust-ups with former employers including Arianna Huffington and AOL.
His colleagues at NSFW are equally punchy, and include Mark Ames, who edited the Moscow-based eXiles magazine, and is famous for combining practical jokes and stories of gory mob slayings, drugs and prostitution with serious, highly respected, political reporting.
PandoDaily, a two-year-old tech blog, bills itself as "the site of record for Silicon Valley," has so far dealt in lighter fare and has been accused by some of pandering to the tech community and the interests of its billionaire backers. Rival blog Valleywag recently called founder Sarah Lacy “tech’s most loyal sycophant.”
Also, unlike NSFW, which Carr has often said was constantly on the edge of running out of cash, Pando has also managed to raise money – $3m to date from some of the Valley’s biggest names, including Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder, and Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder and Facebook backer.
The NSFW team, including Carr, Ames, fellow ex-eXile Yasha Levine and syndicated political commentator David Sirota, will anchor a new, long-form investigative journalism unit at Pando. Carr says what looks like a study in contrast is actually a marriage that has long been in the planning. The site will rename itself Pando.com.
“The two companies are very similar and very connected,” said Carr, who used to work with Lacy at TechCrunch, another tech blog. He said both sides saw the Valley as the new power center, increasingly as involved in areas like education and politics as in technology. “Sarah and I are interested in this huge story that is happening at the intersection of technology and the rest of the world. Tech is taking over everywhere. Look at the NSA story. It’s the story of our time.”
Carr said he did not see Pando as pandering and said the site had been critical of the Valley and its backers on numerous occasions. “With this deal, I challenge anyone to say Pando is too friendly to Silicon Valley,” said Carr. “That meme had begun before Pando published its first word,” he said. “If you want to see Silicon Valley friendly, go to TechCrunch and see press release after press release after press release written up by children,” he said.
Part of Pando’s perception issue, he said, was because “Sarah is a woman in Silicon Valley, so go for it.” (His comment comes after Lacy herself was accused of overlooking Silicon Valley sexism after branding criticism that Twitter had no women board members “manufactured feminist outrage.”)
Carr said he expects Pando to start making more waves, but for different reasons. Pando’s investigative team would target all the most powerful people in the Valley and challenge them “when they need challenging,” he said. Some of Pando’s investors “were going to shit himself” when they heard NSFW’s team was joining Pando, he added.
NSFW Corp will bring some other aspect to the Pando party. The company will publish a paper edition that Carr said had proved popular with his subscribers. About 3,000-4,000 people were subscribing to NSFW’s print edition, said Carr. “The people who loved it the most were the people who spent the most time on the internet,” he said.
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