Football Media

Shiny Media went into adminstration recently – and the fallout has been less than ideal.

There have been reports that Shiny Media had already been bought before this happened, but as things stand the jobs of many bloggers and freelancers are in limbo and access to MovableType, on which most SM sites were running on, was shut down as well.

What does this have to do with football? Shiny Media used to own Who Ate All The Pies – and still host the website despite having sold it to Anorak Media – and access to Pies has been lost along with access to other Shiny Media sites.

Chief blogger / founder Oliver Irish explains:

Anorak Media owns Who Ate All the Pies outright, but there was an arrangement made for Shiny to host Pies for a short period – no more than a few months – after the sale was completed. The site is set to be moved to a new, non-Shiny server later this year.

That move is unlikely to happen now, given that Shiny Media is in administration and legally everything on their servers is now unaccessible to current (former?) staff or to Anorak Media.

It is understood that a new company, imaginatively called Shiny Digital, and owned by a combination of Shiny Media’s founders and a venture capital company, is poised to take over the company’s assets.

But a disagreement with a minority shareholder has seen one director have his mobile phone and email switched off and blocked, and as Ollie suggests, this has also extended to limiting access to blog software for whoateallthepies, which remains in limbo.

“As editor of Who Ate All the Pies, I currently have no access to the site.

I am locked out effectively because of the dispute between Shiny and the ‘minority shareholder’, which is incredibly frustrating – not to mention costly – as Pies is not involved in said dispute.”

And while the blogosphere will (and already has on Twitter) rally around Pies, public pressure is unlikely to have an impact on the situation.

Ollie:

“Unfortunately I don’t think public pressure will resolve this. Pies is caught in the middle of something that may well end up in the law courts.”

I hope that access to Pies is restored this month or that they are allowed to move the site away to a new web-host soon enough. Ollie has done a great job dragging Pies back to life in the last couple of months after it went dormant last year, and another long wait will push them back to square one.

As blog networks go – and this applies to individual blogs as well – here’s a good article to read on businesses in decline and how to deal with them the right way.

Posted by: Ahmed Bilal Posted under: Football Business