Jerry here. Here's the statement I gave to Gawker about the Newsweek complaints:
As for the letters of complaint, Guo tells us they "stem from the fact a) I just didn't end up writing about some of the places I stayed, because they sucked and I wasn't about to portray them as anything else and b) Daily Beast and Newsweek merged last winter, and I left pretty quickly after that, so with a lead time of several weeks / months, those stories just didn't get written."
Here's a statement from Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek on our editorial policy:
Mr. Zakaria emailed Betabeat to explain the change. The Good Life, he said, was “an effort to provide a service for our readers and attract new advertisers. It is quite common in that world for reporters to, say, go to a special tasting at a new restaurant or attend a weekend retreat at a new hotel. I relaxed our rules on this stuff for those two pages.
That's a flattering comparison for us since reddit amas are so addictive / useful / entertaining. But in addition to asking the author, on Qomments the author could ask reader questions which is an interesting experiment in collaborative-crowdsourcing news.
That's a really great point about organizing questions. So at what point would unanswered questions get moved to another page? Since for a new blog post, we wanted to have the least friction in getting started answering a question, and if you have to flip to another tab, that might be a barrier.
As for the letters of complaint, Guo tells us they "stem from the fact a) I just didn't end up writing about some of the places I stayed, because they sucked and I wasn't about to portray them as anything else and b) Daily Beast and Newsweek merged last winter, and I left pretty quickly after that, so with a lead time of several weeks / months, those stories just didn't get written."
Here's a statement from Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek on our editorial policy:
Mr. Zakaria emailed Betabeat to explain the change. The Good Life, he said, was “an effort to provide a service for our readers and attract new advertisers. It is quite common in that world for reporters to, say, go to a special tasting at a new restaurant or attend a weekend retreat at a new hotel. I relaxed our rules on this stuff for those two pages.