U2 lead singer Bono's name appears in The Huffington Post over 10,000 times, according to Google. Will the Web site continue to name-drop him now that his private equity fund Elevation Partners has invested an undisclosed sum in rival news commentary and aggregation Web site TheStimulist.com?
TheStimulist is the brainchild of MSNBC correspondent Carlos Watson and is targeted to 20 to 40 year olds who for the most part rely upon the Web for their news. The site is expected to compete both with the HuffPo as well as Tina Brown's The Daily Beast, which The Stimulist's about page jokes about when it writes "The Stimulist is not... The Daily Beast." In fact, the about page also pokes fun at the pessimistic message of unnamed blogs and aggregators, leaving it to the reader to fill in the blanks.
One blank in the about page is the role of Elevation Partners, the media-oriented private equity fund of Bono and dealmaker Roger McNamee, but TechCrunch had the scoop on McNamee's involvement with Watson. - Matthew Wurtzel
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