Weeks after being named an example of excellence in online journalism at the Online News Association awards for the second year running, the Spanish news site Soitu.es shut down in October 2009. The ONA judges had praised a site “where core ideas come through as confident innovation and mesh with traditional journalism to create a fresh and distinctive package”, singling out its philosophy of sharing and linking, its giveaway widgets, the flashinfo news panel and the elselector crowd-aided aggregation tool — and noting that the site was still a work in progress.
The closure notice, published under the title Hasta la vista y gracias, came from founder Gumersindo LaFuente, who described the site as a victim of the financial crisis. Over the preceding months he had failed to convince its main backer, the bank BBVA, that a young project needed patience in a turbulent economy. Soitu.es was barely two years old and was reaching half a million unique users a month directly, plus around two million more through widgets placed on other sites.
A second post described staff crying, swearing and blaming themselves, and announced a public gathering at the site’s Madrid offices on the Wednesday evening. What Soitu.es had been doing — building tools, testing ways of telling stories online and finding audiences — was what the judges had rewarded, and what its funding ran out before it could finish.