5 Minutes on The Verge: Techmeme's Gabe Rivera
Gabe Rivera is the founder and editor of tech news aggregator Techmeme, which he started in 2005 as a one man operation, and which now has a staff of 10 people who also help to run its sister site, Mediagazer.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gabe Rivera has been explaining Techmeme to the press since it was Memeorandum — see the 2006 interview with Don Dodge — and skeptics have been discounting it almost as long: a 2007 Guardian piece argued everyone overestimated the aggregator's influence. What changed by this 2012 Verge profile is structural: the one-man operation of 2005 is now a ten-person staff, and that same team also runs the sister site Mediagazer.
First-order effects
- A staff of ten converts Techmeme from Rivera's solo algorithm-plus-taste experiment into an edited newsroom, with headcount split across two properties — Techmeme and Mediagazer — rather than concentrated on one.
- The profile traveled through exactly the community Techmeme curates: shares from Kara Swisher, Alexia Tsotsis, MG Siegler and other working tech journalists made the aggregator's own subjects its amplifiers.
Second-order effects
- As the aggregator professionalizes, publishers' incentive to write and time stories for Techmeme placement sharpens — turning the 2007 debate over how much influence the site really has into a question about staffing and editorial judgment rather than algorithms alone.
- Mediagazer extends the same gatekeeping role to media-industry news itself, giving reporters a dedicated front page that ranks coverage of their own trade.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, it points toward lean curator newsrooms competing on editorial judgment instead of scale — a deliberately small-staffed counter-model to venture-backed content operations, with Rivera's hiring choices as the test case.
The trend: Tech news aggregation is maturing from solo algorithmic experiments into small, professionally staffed curation shops whose judgment, not reach, sets what the industry reads.