You don't need me to tell you that that we are in the midst of some very tough times and sadly they affect new media networks like Shiny too.

We have held on as long as we could without restructuring the business but we now have to make those changes to secure the long-term stability of Shiny.

It is with huge regret that we are having to part company with several members of our team . They are very talented and extremely likable individuals, however ultimately in the current climate we are faced with no choice but to let them go.

We also announce today the departure of our editorial director and co-founder Katie Lee from Shiny. Katie played a massive role in developing Shiny and in particular several of its hero blogs. She has now decided that the time is right to leave the business. She does however remain a significant shareholder in Shiny and we are very grateful for all she has done over the years.

Shiny is a British new media success story. We have built a stable of great media brands that between them attract over three million readers each month. Times maybe tough now, but we are confident that this move, though painful in the short term, will leave us well placed to thrive and prosper in the future.

Imagine my surprise when sifting through the mail yesterday I spotted some invites from the Palace (Buckingham Palace that is, not Crystal Palace). Turns out that the Shiny Media founders have all been invited to the re-launch of Her Maj's website, www.royal.gov.uk on February 12th at Buck House itself. She is going to be there too so maybe we can ask her about who she's been poking on Facebook and her favourite Lolcats pictures. Maybe she'll be live tweeting it too! Then again...

At the start of the year, we ran a creative sponsorship campaign with Cisco, asking people to send in videos about their home technology setup (was it "digital heaven" or "digital hell"?). The "My Video Life" campaign (see a post about it here on Tech Digest) included prizes and questionnaires, and Cisco enjoyed working with us so much that when they decided to launch the campaign in the rest of Europe, they asked us to help.

Thanks to our good relationships with European blog networks (we worked with many of them when we worked with LG last year), we were more than happy to oblige!

Ben Blog's Blog.nl and the Dutch Cowboys are all involved in the campaign, which includes the same "Digital Cribs" video competition as well as a survey offering lots of nice prizes.

Vanessa and I went over to Amsterdam to cover Cisco's Visual Networking party at the Heineken in the City Store, attended by the cream of the Dutch tech blogging community. Here's our video of a great night.

We founded Shiny Media as three freelance journalists back in 2004 and the sites were born out of a passion for the internet and a belief that established publishers just weren't making enough of the medium. The early sites were launched because we loved blogs, we wanted to write about things that interested us, and we couldn't find sites like Shoewawa and Shiny Shiny to write for.

So we created those sites ourselves, and we quickly realised that we were on to something. We'd never set up a publishing company before, and there wasn't a UK blogging business template we could follow, so a lot of what we've built up has been learned along the way.

And we've certainly learned a lot since those early days of freelance. We now have a whole team of writers (eleven in house and many more freelance), some of whom have been with us since the very beginning. Fashion journalist and blogger Gemma Cartwright joined us back in November 2004 to start Shoewawa and The Bag Lady and now heads up our entire fashion team, bringing her own successful site, Catwalk Queen, with her. More recently, we have hired two more staff members this month, including Duncan, a staff writer on our oldest and biggest blog Tech Digest and Matt who joins us as an account manager, supporting our growing commercial team.

Revenue is going up month on month and traffic has increased 26 per cent over the last 12 months. So it seems 'rumours of our death' to paraphrase Mark Twain have been greatly exaggerated.

We read the article on Tech Crunch UK and the many comments below the feature and we thought we should respond to them here.