Last Friday it was announced that Outside.in, the site I co-founded along with Steven Johnson and Cory Forsyth in 2006-2007, was being acquired by AOL, to be rolled into their ever-growing news division, which now includes Huffington Post and Patch (and will soon include more it seems).
It’s great news obviously, and I couldn’t be happier. And I think the timing was right, too – though I really believe in sites like outside.in to make local news work better, I think the time to be doing that sort of thing as a startup, out on your own, is coming to a close. Best for them to get with a bigger outfit and start integrating with other products to add value to them and have value added by them. And that seems to be exactly what AOL has in mind. That should allow outside.in to gracefully move on to the next stage and continue to reinvent how local news works.
Anyway, congratulations to everyone who worked on outside.in (50 people in all from inception to acquisition, according to Lauren Sperber). Congrats to CEO Mark Josephson, and also congrats to Jared Ranere, Lauren, Michael Barbano and others – everyone who does much of the work but who usually doesn’t get mentioned in the press releases.
It’s been a great adventure, all in all. Now on to the next, bigger, better thing.
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