I'm mostly in mourning over this…
Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies
It's true. After 17 years as an independent company, Weather Underground has been sold, and will now be part of The Weather Channel Companies (TWCC.) As one of the founders of Weather Underground, I am excited about embarking upon this new chapter in our company's history. Having the infrastructure, resources, and content of The Weather Channel Companies will enable wunderground to create some great new products, and improve the quality and reliability of our existing content.
A point of reference for those who don't get it: (2+ / 0-)
This is like Markos selling DailyKos to News Corp.
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If you say "gullible" real slow, it sounds like "green beans."
by weatherdude on Mon Jul 02, 2012 at 04:15:06 PM EDT
Didn't see anything here on this, so I took a break from the hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing going on in Dr. Masters' blog to post a quick diary, since there's not a fresh open thread available ;-)
I'm just afraid it's going to be another case of 'everything will stay the same, the two entities will be separate' inexorably morphing to WU's unique place in the blog world being subsumed by the usual needs of a large conglomerate needed to grow, grow, grow!
Gotta get some work done now… but I'll be following any comments, I'm sure many of you who know much more than me about everything wx related will have more to say.
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UPDATE:
From a comment from Dr. Masters, answering a question regarding ownership of the media conglomerate in question here:
TWCC are owned by Comcast and private equity firms Bain Capital and Blackstone Capital. In January, the board replaced the CEO and COO of TWC, and the new leadership is determined to move aggressively to improve the web site, and the fastest way to do that was purchase WU.
:: gulp ::
Bain? Bain frakking Capital? Oh jesus, mary and joseph… Comcast wasn't bad enough...