The last couple years have marked a dramatic change in the landscape of technology blogging. Yesterday was no different as it was announced that popular news site ReadWriteWeb has been acquired by the publishing firm SAY Media.
TechCrunch (who was also acquired by AOL in late 2010) is reporting that the value of the transaction was around $5 million. SAY Media is having current staffers sign new contracts that will only go through March of 2012, but has committed to expanding the team and editorial scope of the site. It has already been announced that Dan Frommer of SplatF, will be joining the team as an editor-at-large. There is also plan to do a re-design, utilizing the designers at SAY Media.
ReadWriteWeb started back in April of 2003 and was founded by Richard MacManus. However, as former Mashable editor Ben Parr points out on his blog, this wasn’t an "up" acquisition for SAY. ReadWriteWeb has been losing traffic and key staffers over the last year. The hope for SAY is that with some new financing and talent, things will begin to turn around.
SAY Media it was formed back in 2010 when VideoEgg bought Six Apart, creators of popular blogging platforms LiveJournal, MovableType and TypePad. ReadWriteWeb is the third blog to be acquired by SAY. The first two were Dogster in April 2011 and Remodelista in August.