Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 19 March 2007 at 14:51
Tags: Dennis Publishing, Journalism, Project Badger, Project Red Stripe
I have a story in the current issue of the magazine about the “skunk works” product development projects which are creating new online offerings at Dennis Publishing and The Economist Group.
The Economist’s interal startup, Project Red Stripe, has already had a fair bit of attention, not least from Jeff Jarvis and the Slashdot crowd.
Dennis’s skunk works project has received less attention. Project Badger is tasked with launching five web sites this year. If and when they achieve an audience of 100,000 unique users per month, Project Badger will turn them over to Dennis Interactive to monetise. The first of the Project Badger sites, KnowYourMobile, is slated to launch this week.
When I visited Project Badger a fortnight ago in their headquarters in Felix Dennis’s spare bedroom, they were in the midst of a complicated effort hire a developer as the the fourth member of their (four-person) team.
Mat Toor, who runs Project Badger, told me that it had been difficult to fill the position, because he was trying to find a particular type of all-rounder.
“Actually finding someone to work full time has been a real challenge. I didn’t want a designer; I wanted someone who did all the nuts and bolts. Tim O’Reilly said at the AOP conference that programmers are the journalists of the 21st century. I was looking for someone who knew how to do mashups with Google and all the rest of it. We’d come up with some idea and he’s make it work. But they are not easy to find — certainly not British or EU ones. The person we want is Chinese, and hasn’t got a work permit. We’re having to jump through all these hoops to tell the Home Office why we should have this guy.”
According to Toor’s latest blog post, though, he has finally convinced the Home Office, and has been able to hire Lin Jia.
