Hotnews.ro: No Longer That Hot

I remember a time when I used to click on the shortcut icon of hotnews.ro and be taken directly to a quick and wholesome digest of the latest and greatest articles to be found in the Romanian press. A Romanian friend had recommended this site and I never questioned who was behind this venture, as it had the look and feel of something a bunch of efficient programmers without an agenda would do. Just a neat news aggregator-like site, very cool and practical, in which articles were listed, with links to the respective publications at their bottom.

Lately, I noticed that most featured articles lacked that link which led to their original location. And that they were signed, mysteriously enough, "Hotnews". Hmm. I thought this must have been a temporary bug occurring during some kind of content migration, so I went on reading as usual -- especially the first two screens of Hotnews. Until one day I realized that, if you had enough time to scroll and scroll, there were articles at the bottom with "real authors" and links to other online publications, like in the old days. Only then did I figure it out: the "premium real estate" of the site had been taken over by a team of Hotnews' very own journalists. Nobody asked us, the users, by then surely a quite sizable amount, if that was what we wanted. Stealthily, "they" (who ever "they" were) just went ahead and did it anyway.

Then I saw all kinds of weird non-news items littering those precious few first screens -- and many announced... blogs that were rolled out by team members of the formerly transparent news aggregator, Hotnews! Holy shit, one moment you read about Saddam's death, the next (and in the same order of importance, given the way Hotnews works) you read that there is a new blog under the "Hotnews" umbrella, written by some obscure journalist! Or shameless plugs -- like the one in the picture above -- parachuted in the middle of the news stream, pestering us about small individual ventures belonging to... "them" or "their friends".

One of these is particularly aggressive -- Iulian Comanescu. This guy keeps a blog and he interviews miscellaneous figures of Romanian mass media via Yahoo Messenger!(naming the insufficiently edited YM logs "ymterviews".) He uses the latter to prominently highlight himself as this fast-typing, cheeky media guru in pixel diapers.

Comanescu is not famous as a journalist. As to his skills as a manager -- I neither know nor care. However, he takes a keen interest in what's going on in the Romanian media, keeping a eye on all the movers and shakers. It is an insider's perspective, to be sure -- but one that fails to interest readers at large. I'm sure he has his niche, but advertising for those ymterviews and blogs in such a visible spot is a lousy idea, to say the least.

As a consultant for Hotnews, Comanescu tirelessly peddles his budding "media empire" under the name of "Comanescu's Media". He also teamed up with author/professor/blogger Sorin Adam Matei, and together with a bunch of other journalists they are trying to create some momentum around their "alternative" online media outlet, represented by a bunch of blogs. It's romantic, if you think about it, this dream of theirs that one day they'll be rich and famous on their own taking advantage of the recent flood of (mostly dubious) cash that submerged the Romanian media. In the process, Comanescu daydreamed (while interviewing someone, obviously, because nobody ever interviews him) that their current common springboard, poor hijacked Hotnews, would be bought out in the near future by some hungry-for-content media conglomerate for a few dozen million Euros. Or who knows, maybe they are all connected to Hotnews and their product is the whole enchilada.

However that may be, it beats me why, before "they" put it on the market, "they" decided to tear Hotnews down. Compare a lean and mean "before" edition (December 31, 2004) to a recent never-ending, bloated and self-promoting version (January 31, 2007).

All we're left with now is My Press (http://www.my-press.ro/), before some smartass(es) decide(s) to smoothly hijack its "captive audience" and cajole it into reading yet another publication by a bunch of people who want to make it big.