Stepehen Norman

Badness emanates from PandoDaily all the time, but the site has been especially reeky lately.

Pando is the tech-news site with corruption built right into it: Its investors are a whole bunch of financiers with fingers in nearly every Silicon Valley pie. Just about everything the site publishes touches in some way on the business interests of its owners. But its biggest problem from the perspective of a news consumer isn't so much that the site is so shamelessly shilly -- it's that it's so shamelessly silly (not that these things are unrelated).

The site is as light as graphene aerogel, and it produces little that could be considered useful or insightful. Certainly, there isn't much in the way of industry criticism there, but that's not necessarily, by itself, a big problem. Many trade magazines tend to shy away from criticizing the industries they cover, but that doesn't necessarily render them stupid.

Much worse is Pando's general bubbleheadedness and a preening self-regard that is so woefully misplaced here that it actually makes for a rather amusing spectator sport.

Case in point: The public radio show Marketplace last week decided to elicit Pando editor Sarah Lacy offered her opinion on the BART strike. What Sarah Lacy offered wasn't so much an opinion as it was a word salad.