CNN buying mashable ?

By Tom Chivers
Telegraph

It's been a good week, apparently, for Pete Cashmore, the infuriatingly youthful and square-jawed founder of Mashable.com. The so-called "Brad Pitt of the blogosphere", 26, is reportedly in final-stage talks to sell his brainchild for a cool $200 million (£127 million) to CNN. He has issued a semi-denial, saying that the “rumor going around on Twitter that Mashable will be acquired this week” is false, but that rather leaves open the possibility that it will be acquired, say, next week.
If you get your news via Twitter and RSS feeds, like a proper modern young thing, you'll be aware of Mashable. It's essentially a tech blog made good, focusing on new innovations and business developments, with a few top-10-style lists or "how to plan your wedding online" geeky linkbait things. That might not sound too exciting, but it's relatively big news – its pages were viewed 34 million times last month, by an estimated three million different people. Mainly, it's notable for writing up complicated, tech-heavy stories in language that technology semi-dunces like me can understand.
What's not immediately clear is what's in it for CNN, who, obviously, have many times that number of readers (1.2 billion page views, estimated 34 million different visitors), not to mention a global television channel which is playing on the big wall behind me as I speak. £127 million is not a small amount of money even for Ted Turner's billions, and it will, at first glance, only get him a very slightly larger market share.
I spoke briefly to Rob Jackson, MD of tech startup Elisa DBI and an occasional Telegraph blogger who works in a tech startup, and he says that the difference is that Mashable gives CNN a direct route into the youngish, canvas-shoulder-bag-wearing, longboard-riding, Silicon Valley start-up entrepeneur market. Mashable is extremely well read through social networks, and especially Twitter – it has 2.7 million followers – which is a real digital-media-industry playground, so it will put them in contact with a subset of the population – tech-savvy, rimless glasses, artfully artless three-day stubble – who might otherwise have ignored CNN as an old-media dinosaur.
"It'll be interesting to see what direction they take it in," says Rob, pointing out that other major companies have tried this before. News International bought up MySpace a few years ago, and did so badly that I just had to go and check to see whether MySpace still exists (it does). Time Warner merged with AOL in 2000, becoming one of the world's biggest media organisations, but nothing much happened with it and the two broke up again in 2009.
CNN may do a better job, if they let Mashable be what Mashable is rather than try to force it into new and uncomfortable shapes. But major news organisations trying to sprinkle themselves with tech-startup stardust often end up looking like a dad borrowing their teenage kid's iPod for an office party. CNN now has access to a moneyed, educated, cool young audience. Now they just have to do something with it.