Media or Software?
August 7th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoThe Los Angeles Times just announced a few minutes ago that it has appointed a Vice President of Software Engineering and Architecture — shortly after appointing a CTO from Edmunds.com and Yahoo/Overture. Now, what does this say about the massive changes facing the newspaper publishing industry, when they are laying off journalists and hiring software VPs? Are newspapers media companies, or software companies?
Tom Foremski (a Silicon Valley independent blogger/reporter) had an interesting post on this earlier this year, claiming that the center of the media world is shifting to Silicon Valley. From my own experience–although I’m probably biased, as I started out my career as a software engineer, not a journalist–our own business is as much software as it is media.
