Its not every day that you see a traditional media company poach from a new media company, but this is exactly what happened when CBS hired Richard Lawson from Gawker Media.
Lawson will be writing for TV.com in a role that is similar to what he already has been doing for Gawker: writing what is happening on famous TV shows.
Lawson will be writing fewer posts per day and do actual reviews. Lawson has supposedly been generating 2.4 million pageviews per month for Gawker, more than any of Gawkers’ others writers.
The three founders of Last.fm Richard Jones, Martin Stiksel, and Felix Miller will most likely be leaving CBS by the end of the year. About two years ago, Last.fm was sold to CBS for $280 million. The three founders will be leaving to start another project.
“This is the latest stage in a long journey for us founders, which began in a living room in east London in 2002, and took us to the headquarters of one of the biggest media companies in the world,” stated the founders of Last.fm.
The founders are not planning on any reasons revolving around the acquisition, but more because the website is in great shape. They even said the company may even do better without the “crazy founder dudes hanging around.”
The three co-founders will be stepping down by the end of the month, but will serve as advisors for three months. The three co-founders will also help pick another head for Last.fm. Last.fm has about 37.7 million users.
In the past, TechCrunch had heard rumors accusing either CBS or the Last.fm founders of sending user data to the RIAA. Both CBS and Last.fm had denied those claims.
According to a tip received at TechCrunch, Last.fm handed data over to the RIAA about their users. Erick Schonfeld published an article regarding the tip and it was homepaged on Digg. The rumor was Last.fm handed data to the RIAA so they could find out who listened to the leaked U2 album. Many Last.fm executives denied the allegations in the TechCrunch blog post and Ars Technica even wrote an article that the RIAA didn’t know where that rumor came from.
“When you signup to Last.fm and scrobble what you listen to, you are trusting us with your listening data. We take this very seriously. The old-timers on Last.fm who’ve been with us since the early days can attest to this – we’ve always been very open and transparent about how your data is used. This hasn’t changed,” stated Richard Jones, a founder of Audioscrobbler. Audioscrobbler was merged with Last.fm before it was acquired by CBS Interactive for $280 million. “We never share personally identifiable data such as email and IP addresses. The only type of data we make available to labels and artists, other than what you see on the site, is aggregate data of listeners and number of plays.”
The blog post for Last.fm’s response was “Techcrunch are full of sh**.” It is good to see how quickly Last.fm responded to rumors like that. TechCrunch is often times seen as a credible source for other news outlets to syndicate. TechCrunch could really taint the images of companies, but this time the tables have turned on them.
To learn more about the PR for CBS Interactive, I recommend following Katie Gunion on Twitter.
