What to make of RawStory?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

The crew at RawStory is a little strange. Every year they do a fundraiser to build a new, better website. But no new site ever gets built. Back in early 2007 myself and a friend had long talks with them. They had an ambitious list of things they wanted: community features, everyone gets a blog, voting articles to the front page, integration with Digg (this was when Digg was at its peak), every element of the interface Ajax driven and no pages reload ever. We told them we could do it for $45,000. We are damn lucky they did not accept that bid. In retrospect, we realized the work would require at least $100,000. But they thought $45,000 was too much. Now almost 4 years have passed, their traffic has declined dramatically, and they are still struggling to get a new site built. We live in an interesting world now, where content people (writers, videographers, photographers, etc) need to understand tech much more than in the past. And when they do not, bad things happen.