News: Topix Beds The Newspapers...

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Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix, which I wrote of glowingly here, called me earlier today to break the news: His company is selling a 75% stake to three major newspaper businesses: Gannett, Knight Ridder, and the Tribune Company. None of the new companies will have the ability to control the company, and this alone says volumes about how Web 2.0 is terrifying the newspaper industry. They can't even buy their competition outright! Rich would not give me a ballpark valuation, but given that he has real revenues and a scalable model with OEM potential (in terms of optimizing contextual ads and local), I'd wager it was pretty good - better than Flickr, perhaps. I'm just in from a few whirlwind days at PCForum, which had a lot of search in it. I'll be digesting this news, as well as PCForum thoughts, over the next few days. Meanwhile, the Topix release is in extended entry....

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