And so Peoplenews.com folds, and a version of the truth finally dribbles out after months of faux spin. Diary can't help feeling sorry for founder Jane Procter who was still phoning around frantically last Friday to find someone to buy her gossip website. In view of CEO Simon Walker's desperation to unload the whole shebang and its apparent debt for a puny £1, it's strange that in interviews a few days later he claimed Peoplenews had been close to profitability. And impressive that it had burned through £5m in such a short time. But most extraordinary of all is that it lasted so long. To this end, Diary would like to present Peoplenews with its Award for Endurance (for becoming a one-year-old mishap when it should have been a fly-by-night dot.com disaster). An honour indeed.
As this is the last time Diary can justifiably reflect on Peoplenews, it's only fair that this should be a eulogy, and thus should mention its heyday when everyone displayed bullish naivety about what constituted "a business". In the Sunday Telegraph last July Andrew Neil, non-exec chairman of Peoplenews, described it as "a venture which has all the hallmarks of being one of the most successful in the dot. com business". And last April Catherine Ostler, former editor of Peoplenews, wrote in the London Evening Standard: "Some journalistic egos won't travel easily on to the web which cuts their umbilical cord to their photo byline in print, but for those who survive that surgery, this is where the action is. I've never been so excited by a job in my life." Thanks for the entertainment guys.
Out of the blue, BT last week invited agencies to pitch for the design of a new gaming website. With Gameplay still not properly wound up, it's curious that BT, a 10% shareholder, should take another stroll into the online gaming market when everyone else in that sector has given up. The logical explanation is that it's a market ripe for exploitation, so why did the agencies pick holes in the pitch document, leading BT to take the design and development in-house? The word is that BT is rushing to get something together for September's interactive entertainment exhibition ECTS, so it can still be seen to be "a player" in the youth gaming market. Wild.