Om Malik, founder of GigaOm (a blog that should be on your news reader), talks about his days at Business 2.0 which is in danger of being shut down by parent company, Time Inc.:

It still doesn’t take away from the fact that I did some of my best work for Business 2.0, working hard, not because those Time Warner options were going to make me rich, but because I believed in the magazine. What a fool as I was – in the end it was a business, managed and remotely from a glass cocooned Manhattan tower – where they don’t know a thing about passionate readers, or communities or the fact that their world is no longer theirs. I hope, I never forget this lesson, as I build my little company.

I built Muniwireless from the ground up, starting it out as a blog and turning it into a media company with the help of partners. I did not start blogging about citywide Wi-Fi to make money. At the time I started it, I wanted to solve a problem: how to aggregate all the information about muni Wi-Fi projects in one place so that cities, vendors, service providers and journalists could easily find it. That’s it. It was a passion and still is. I am opinionated because I want ubiquitous wireless broadband that’s fast, cheap and good. For everyone not just people who can afford $80 per month subscriptions.

Large media companies seem to be controlled by machines crunching numbers. It’s never about the audience, never about a passion to bring something valuable to people. It’s about those numbers. Never mind if they print garbage including stories about celebrities, as long as they can run endless numbers of ads around them. If their publications fail, good riddance.

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