On BoomTown’s recent grand tour of Europe, I paid a visit a week ago to London to moderate some sessions at Media Guardian’s Changing Media Summit 2009.

As in the U.S., a lot of the same questions were asked there about when and how the new media business would cross the Rubicon to transform into a strongly profitable and sustainable business.

And the answer to that query was just as hard to find as here.

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Earlier today, BoomTown broke the stunning-for-blogs news that ContentNext, owner of the popular online digital media news site paidContent, was being bought by the Guardian Media Group for about $30 million in an earn-out acquisition.

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

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In what will be yet another new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group will announce this morning that it will buy the digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

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So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?
Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop [...]

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The annual CTIA conference–CTIA reps the wireless industry–opens today in San Francisco, but the action started last night with some parties.
One was thrown by ContentNext Media, the online news site whose flagship paidContent.org writes all about online media, where I talked to Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali about big trends in cellphones.
He was spot on. [...]

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On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I went to visit Rafat Ali, the energetic founder of ContentNext Media Inc.
While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.
Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter [...]

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