The Bold Italic to Reopen Without Any Original Staff
image from kqed
Earlier this morning The Bold Italic announced that it would be reopening in San Francisco. This is exciting considering what a blow to the Bay Area media landscape it was when TBI closed in April.
The curious thing is that it appears not a single of TBI’s original employees is involved with the reincarnated website. The Bold Italic’s parent company Gannett has sold The Bold Italic and while, I’m waiting for confirmation on who the new owners are, the following tweet confirms that it is now being run by Sunil Rajaraman and Sonia Arrison. According to their twitter profiles, Rajaraman confounded Scrpited, a content creation website, and Arrison is a writer who focuses on technology.
While I’m curious to see what the new Bold Italic will produce, I find it baffling that nobody from the team that helped build the previous incarnation into a media juggernaut that got millions of monthly views was hired back.
Please check back here for more updates.
Update: I just got off the phone with Sunil Rajaraman who said that he and Arrison formed a new media company to buy TBI from Gannett. He also said their initial impulse was to make sure all the TBI’s content wasn’t taken down and they are currently discussing the brand’s next steps. When asked why nobody from the former staff was hired on, he said that he had meetings with many of the members of the original Bold Italic staff and that no final staffing decisions had been made yet.
That said many former TBI staffers I talked to feel heartbroken not to be involved in the new company.
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