Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

NewsCred Buys DayLife

Content distributor NewsCred has acquired DayLife, a news aggregator that attracted a high-profile list of investors but never got much traction.

NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam won’t disclose a purchase price for the deal, but I’m assuming this is an “acqhire.” All eight of DayLife’s employees will join NewsCred, Islam says.

NewsCred, which raised a $4 million round last year, initially pitched itself as a “next-generation newswire” that provided stories for the likes of the Chicago Tribune. But its main business now is helping brands like Toyota, Pepsi and Johnson & Johnson assemble content for their own branded sites.

Last year, Islam told me he was generating revenue of $1 million a year; now he says he’s doing “many, many times more,” and has a staff of 65.

DayLife started out in New York in 2006, and in 2007 announced a funding round that included many of the Web’s boldfaced names, including the New York Times, Craig Newmark, John Borthwick and Michael Arrington.

Two years ago, it rolled out a photo distribution service and gathered an investment from Getty Images; it raised $15 million overall.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald