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Earlier this year Mashable, the tech news website with plans to become much bigger than a tech news website, announced it had taken on outside investment money for the first time. Now it has taken on some more.
Tribune Company, the newspaper and TV conglomerate, has invested $700,000 in the site, founded by Pete Cashmore in 2005. A Mashable rep confirmed the deal.
The funding is considered part of the same round Mashable announced in January, when it said it had raised $13.3 million. The new investment brings the total to $14 million. Tribune’s money comes from its Tribune Digital Ventures arm, a year-old unit headed by former Yahoo executive Shashi Seth.
The funding is likely more important for Mashable as a strategic deal. Mashable started out as a site that focused on social media sites like Myspace, but over the years it has broadened its ambitions to be a general interest news site that provides updates on everything from Oscar dresses to America’s nuclear arms policy in an easy-to-digest style. It now boasts more than 30 million readers a month.
Tribune is in the process of spinning out its newspaper group, which includes the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. If the company adds this asset to that spinout, you might see Mashable content in those papers and vice versa; I could also imagine a scenario where Tribune keeps Mashable with its TV and radio assets, and uses its content to help build out a digital presence for those properties.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
