FreshNetworks Blog

Guest post by Ben LaMothe

Key to successful community management is understanding what a community’s interests are. In media, it’s important to know where your community gets its news and information on a daily basis.  Unfortunately for TIME Magazine neither concept was paid much attention to with the launch of their new tech news site Techland.

Writing on his Twitter account earlier last week, paidContent founder Rafat Ali summed it up in 140 characters: “Time.com launches standalone tech site Techland, filing the void in the consumer tech coverage online. Just in time.”

With the launch of this web site, it leads me to wonder just how much TIME Magazine knows about the tech news community.

My initial thought was that TIME sees dollar signs. The tech community is full of early-adopters who buy up the latest and greatest in tech devices, often at higher-than-it-should-be prices. There’s a major advertising opportunity here, because it allows TIME to charge higher ad premiums than it can on TIME.com. I can’t say that with certainty; however that’s where my thought process leads to.

According to MediaBistro Techland will be led by a group of tech media icons, and senior writers at TIME.com. Here’s a breakdown of how Techland plans to serve the tech community:

Techland will feature interviews with icons of the tech culture world; breaking tech news and features; previews of products, books and shows; weekly video wrap-ups with Grossman and Ha playing new games while discussing tech news; weekly video reviews; Battlestar Galactica updates; news on comic books, science-fiction literature and films; and exclusive clips, commentary and video interviews on TV shows, DVDs and video games.

The Grossman and Ha mentioned are TIME senior writer Lev Grossman and TIME technology editor Peter Ha.

By that description, Techland has a lot to live up to. It’s clear that their aim is to hijack the tech news community with a super flashy (and, in my opinion, hideously designed) web site and the backing of a massive legacy publisher.

With so many tech news outlets already aimed at consumers, what does TIME hope to achieve with Techland?

Now-former TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel explains the rationale:

Techland understands that the same people who care about the latest Apple news also happen to like Star Trek and World of Warfare. It’s a link between technology and culture, with the resources and standards of a mainstream media outlet. We believe there’s really nothing else like it.

What this boils down to is essentially tech news for the masses, veiled as an attempt to connect with the tech community. That’s a big community management fail, in part, because it seems that a lot of assumptions are being made about the community they’re hoping to serve.

By bringing together all of these relatively-unrelated topics onto one web site, I’m sure TIME thinks it’s making it easier for users to get information about the things they’re interested in, with little effort required. But is that a problem? Are tech news readers upset that they can’t get their Battlestar Galactica news updates on the same site as the breakdown of the latest iPhone OS update?

I haven’t done the research, but I suspect it’s not keeping people up at night. From where I’m sitting, this boils down to a money-grab by a cash-strapped legacy media publisher wanting to latch onto the coattails of an increasingly influential tech news scene. The community may not stand for it.