Keep an eye on Messy Media, the new London-based publishing startup from Lloyd Shepherd (ex Yahoo, ex Guardian, and ex Yahoo again) and Andrew Levy (ex Yahoo), formally unveiled yesterday on Lloyd’s blog. I met up with Lloyd to talk about this a while back, and he’s got some exciting plans for it all.
It’s a simple premise, and indeed, it isn’t a particularly unique premise: decent journalism done through the medium of blogging. Nick Denton has done it with Gawker; closer to home, Shiny Media have been doing it for almost three years (starting off with little more than a bunch of Typepad accounts!). And of course, in the meantime, proper journalism has started to get its head around blogging.
But Lloyd clearly has some strong ideas about editorial, and his passion is infective. ‘We believe there’s a clear opportunity in Britain,’ he declares, ‘to use the blogging format to do proper journalism – to entertain and inform. Proper design, professional editorial development and a serious commercial proposition are all part of that.’ Bring it on.