Thursday, March 20, 2008

Finalists

reporterist is now a finalist in the prestigious Berkeley Business Plan Competition. We are one of 8 finalists narrowed down from 25 semi-finalists, and over a 100 entrants. I believe there is a good mix of live sites and in-the-works concepts. We briefly met some of our fellow finalists from Kebima - they look like they have an awesome alpha. Good luck guys!

We presented to a panel of judges (from the VC/investor community) yesterday afternoon, and the results were announced at about 7pm. Preparation involved many hours of ms-office-ing.

Happily, I can now get back to building you a better product (for a short time - then we have to take another detour and prepare for the finals!)

Saturday, March 1, 2008

looking for a senior engineer.

reporterist is looking to hire a senior engineer. We recently received some seed funding to help us accelerate our development.

Many newsrooms are forced to lay off quality reporters and rely more on wire service stories. The number of places that fund primary reporting and produce investigative journalism is shrinking - and these are increasingly owned by a few large companies.

As a citizen of the world's largest democracy, and a permanent resident of the world's most vocal democracy - this trajectory scares the crap out of me.

Call me a dreamer - but I believe that reporterist will help change this trajectory. And that's precisely why it's a great time to be innovating in the media industry.

We are starting by creating an efficient market for news that rewards accurate, timely, and reliable content. This will increase the diversity, quantity, and quality of original and unbiased news that gets published.

Soon we will start work on a platform that will make it *even* easier for smaller publishers to create high quality news publications.

If that's a vision that excites you, read on. You can find out a bit more about our team here. If you

  • have a solid computer science background

  • are comfortable programming in Ruby/Java, but know pointers like the back of your hand

  • have, ideally, spent several years working with scalable systems


then shoot me a note at innovate-at-reporterist-dot-com.