X Prize News Coverage Question

[richalex]

Two months ago, I first saw announcements for X Prize 2007 carried on Space.com. I expected that other space news-related websites would eventually pick up the story, but they never did. Why is Space.com the only site to pre-announce X Prize 2007?

 

[spacester]

It's a very good question, but are you sure no one else did any stories? I take it you mean no one else made a big deal out of it like sdc did.<br /><br />It's called market positioning. The dividing up of media into categories and each media outlet settling into its niche. The percentage of stories from this site showing up on other news sites has shot up over the last year.<br /><br />SDC has found it's niche. Good for them.<br /><br />The main reason IMO is high quality writing. Leonard David in particular, but the others are quite good as well. Also good editorial choices, such as X-Prize coverage.<br /><br />I do think it's not as healthy as it could be, having just one news outlet that covers a segment that's so critical to space growth. I don't blame SDC for dominating the scene, but I also have to trust they don't try to actually exclude others. <br /><br />This place was on pretty shaky ground not too many years ago, and now they look to flex their muscles a bit. Good on them.<br /><br />All the other space news sites have their own constituency, a little bit different target market. I'll stop before getting too gossipy. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[richalex]

I did not make an exhaustive survey, but of the half-dozen space news websites that I frequent, I saw advanced notice of the X Prize posted only on Space.com. I watched for about 2 months for the other websites to provide some announcement, but if they did, I missed it. When I returned, I googled for coverage, but only found one article, reporting after the fact. It makes me wonder if X Prize has some sort of exclusive business relationship with Space.com. How else to account for so little coverage of such a significant event in the space community? And, how did those other 50k people find out about the event?