Pharma, Startups

Veteran reporter Luke Timmerman is back – and launching his own biotech news site

Luke Timmerman’s gone rogue. The veteran life sciences reporter, who left Xconomy last year, is back to day-to-day journalism. Except […]

Luke Timmerman’s gone rogue.

The veteran life sciences reporter, who left Xconomy last year, is back to day-to-day journalism. Except this time, he’s doing it on his own: Timmerman just launched his own biotech site – The Timmerman Report – with plans to charge readers a modest sum to gain access to his insights.

Timmerman, an MIT grad, has covered the biz since 2001 – working at the Seattle TimesBloomberg and Xconomy, helping build the latter’s reputation from the ground up. He left last March to write a book on gene sequencing pioneer Leroy Hood; as he wraps up the books’s finishing touches, Timmerman will be working on his new site.

“…I have missed the action of day-to-day journalism. It’s my passion,” Timmerman writes. “We’re living in a wonderfully creative time for biotech, and it’s a privilege to write about it. The main question for me has been how to find, or create, the right platform for doing what I love to do.”

Here’s how the new site works: For $99, he’ll unlock a “year’s worth of in-depth news, features, and original commentary to help you get ahead. He offers a lowered rate – $25 – to graduate students and postdocs.

The site, which went live February 2, launched with three posts: A guest column from Alkermes CEO Richard Pops on how the current biotech boom’s impacted R&D, a piece Timmerman on industry personnel shuffling and another that describes the new site’s business model and value proposition.

Timmerman’s reporting represents a fascinating departure from the traditional model of journalism. Thanks to the powers of the webs, journalists with enough cache are now able to cut their ties with larger news sites and migrate to their own. Will people pay? It remains to be seen, but my money’s on Timmerman. It’s fantastic to have such a valuable reporter back on the scene.

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