The Inquisitr » Valleywag

Owen Thomas leaves Valleywag for NBC

Duncan Riley — Sat, 02 May 2009 01:05:22 +0000

Valleywag Editor Owen Thomas is leaving the Gawker Media empire for greener pastures at NBC, according naturally to Valleywag.

Thomas joined Valleywag in 2007 from Business 2.0, and oversaw the demise of the site from a multi-person dedicated Silicon Valley gossip blog, to a column on Gawker.com that mostly covered Twitter posts and Julia Allison. Taking over from Thomas is Ryan Tate, who was previously Gawker’s night editor. Tate is reasonably well connected to the Valley, having studied at UC Berkeley where among other things he ran a campus newspaper.

The only surprise in Thomas’ move to NBC is that he didn’t move to TechCrunch, where his mix of tech gossip and Twitter would have been a perfect fit.

(image: Laughing Squid)

Blog War! Arrington blames AllThingsD, Valleywag for hate campaign

Duncan Riley — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:38:28 +0000

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has publicly named Valleywag, and AllThingD as leading the hate campaign that led to him being spat on in Germany, and stalked.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (which owns AllThingsD) Arrington said that while no particular site urged him specific harm, “a handful of tech blogs… have published matter that damaged my site’s reputation, including AllThingsD.com” and Valleywag.

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, someone we hold in high regard here, denied any connection. “Our site is trying to raise ethical and reporting standards in the tech blogosphere but is in no way responsible for people stalking Michael Arrington. To say so is truly unfortunate on his part,” she said. “I am appalled he is being stalked, which is scary and disturbing, and am sorry for the strife it has clearly caused him and his family.”

I not long ago wrote a post where I’d hoped that Michael looked inward in regard to his current issues; that he continues to blame others is part and parcel of the problem.

LA gets its own Tech News and Gossip site Lalawag

Duncan Riley — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:35:54 +0000

Sean Percival, formerly with Mahalo and known to many as a strong Second Life advocate (he also wrote a book on the subject) has launched Lalawag, a tech gossip and news blog for Southern California.

Percival says that there’s a burgeoning startup tech scene here in Los Angeles, but no one really documenting it, at least not in a significant way.

The site will cover tech news and gossip, but despite the name it’s not a SoCal Valleywag, although it will have elements of Valleywag with former Valleywag intern and one of my favorite TechCrunch commenters (well, at least when I wasn’t the target) Alaska Miller joining the team as well.

Along with local news, the site will document news outside the region, and offers syndicated links to news in New York and Silicon Alley.

We wish Sean and the team luck, and I’ve added the RSS feed to GReader.

Valleywag to close, become Gawker column instead

Duncan Riley — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 00:15:57 +0000

No sooner had we hit publish on the possible Gawker cuts ahead post then we find the latest news. Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag is to cease as a stand alone site and will instead become a column on Gawker.

In traditional Gawker Media style, the genesis of the idea started with Valleywag editor Owen Thomas joking that he’d end up writing writing Valleywag as a column for Gawker yesterday. As Thomas notes in a post to Valleywag, Denton liked the idea so much, it’s now going to happen.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, the Valleywag brand will live on, but the column will reside on the Gawker.com URL. Thomas has also been demoted from Editor status to columnist. Not word yet on Valleywag’s two remaining writers, paid writer Paul Boutin and intern Alaska Miller, but we’re presuming both are likely to be dumped.

Vale Valleywag…sort of.

Cuts coming to Gawker Media, Denton claims wide model is over

Duncan Riley — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:48:10 +0000

UPDATE: since publishing this post, Valleywag has been cut. Details here.

UPDATE 2: Consumerist is officially on the market

Gawker Media head Nick Denton delivered another doom and gloom essay today, arguing that advertising online is headed for a big fall.

You can read the whole thing here, and others are talked about the advertising numbers, so we won’t go over them as well.

Two takeaways though are interesting. Denton notes that 91% of advertising revenues at Gawker Media come from the top six titles from a total of 12. At the same time, rumors have surfaced that Denton is trying to find a buyer for The Consumerist. Whether Denton may be looking to close or sell the other 5 lower performing sites isn’t known, but we can work out which sites are facing issues based on what Denton wrote in October.

Denton previously named the best performing titles as Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and Gawker, and suggested at the time that Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik were close to obtaining that level. He has previously made cuts at The Consumerist, Fleshbot and Valleywag. Defamer wasn’t mentioned then so add that to the bottom four list. Of the remainder, Deadspin has low traffic, and Jalopnik is car industry focused…and we all know what’s going on in that industry at the moment, so its a good chance of being in the bottom six.

Denton also made mention of the wide model in his post, which is similar to what I was talking about in the blog networks are dying post. Denton doesn’t argue for the one big site model, but he does say that the wide model is over in favor of key brands:

Consolidate titles. Time-pressed media buyers are drawn to scale. Most websites are still way too small to register with the audience-tracking services that agencies rely upon. Of 18 titles launched at Gawker Media, we’ve already spun off or shuttered six. Even now, 91% of advertising revenues come from the top six remaining titles. Every media group has a similarly lopsided distribution. It’s time to choose which properties make it aboard the lifeboat. The era of the sprawling network—established franchises mixed in with experimental sites—is over.

Emphasis is mine, but its the key line.

(img credit: The Guardian)

Being An MIT Dropout Doesn’t Save Boutin From Being An Idiot

Steven Hodson — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 03:40:38 +0000

The word has come down from the mount folks. Courtesy of people like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble who have in the words of his eminence of verbal buffoonery Paul Boutin shown that blogging has become the last refuge of cut rate journalists, underground marketing. For Calacanis blogs have become too impersonal which is why he switched to an email newsletter limited to 750+ people but gets posted immediately to 1,000’s of blogs verbatim = clever marketing that. Then there’s Robert Scoble who seems to be more of a megaphone these days rather than a blogger – but then what is a blogger anyway?

According to the incredible wisdom of Boutin it is something that is so 2004 and has been replaced by better things like Facebook, Twitter and other such intellectually stimulating forms of idea sharing. Of course we would never see any marketing taking place on the hallowed ground of Facebook, especially in the “Pepsi Lovers Kill the Coke Lovers” group. Or how about the purity of Twitter were we would never get 140 character invitations to see some pretty girl’s pictures she took just for you. No, it is only on blogs now where you are forced to read such lowbrow dribble of people like Michael Geist breakdown the workings of copyright law in Canada, or fall asleep reading Chris Brogan help us understand the ins and out of what social media is really about. Yup blogging is so much a waste of our time as compared to being poked on Facebook or trying to figure out who said what to whom on Twitter.

But poor litle Paul Boutin only seems to think that blogging has become the territory of the haters of the world who regularily invade these old and tired blogs

That said, your blog will still draw the Net’s lowest form of life: The insult commenter. Pour your heart out in a post, and some anonymous troll named r0rschach or foohack is sure to scribble beneath it, “Lame. Why don’t you just suck McCain’s ass.” That’s why Calacanis has retreated to a private mailing list. He can talk to his fans directly, without having to suffer idiotic retorts from anonymous Jason-haters.

Give me a break – Calacanis retreated to a mailing list because it caused a buzz on the web and he knew well enough that there were enough people out there who hung off of every word he dribbled forth, that each and every issue would get posted and reap him far better Google juice than just him typing on his own blog. The funny thing is that this tiresome tirade is coming from the same slash and burn blogger that ValleyWag loved having on its payroll just because of those very comment trolls – talk about being facetious. This is the same blogger who perfected the one paragraph guillotine post and he talks about blogging as being tired and old. Maybe it’s the other way around – maybe Boutin is just getting tired and old.

As Mathew Ingram wrote today on this

I’m hoping that Boutin’s post took about the same amount of time as it did to come up with that Twitter message, because it has about as much value. Is everyone going to have a blog? No — and they never were. Facebook and Twitter are probably enough for many people. Not writing at all is enough for many people. But why does it have to be all or nothing? What we have now is the option to micro-blog (i.e., Twitter) some thoughts, post others to Facebook, share things on FriendFeed or through Google Reader, and blog things that take longer to think through.

Yup maybe that’s it – Boutin has spent so many years writing slash and burn type posts that he has forgotten what it takes to write anything of substances because if this post on Wired is any example he still hasn’t figured out what substantive writing is all about. Like Douglas Karr pointed out there is a little something about writing good blog posts that seem to have slipped by Boutin in his rush to eulogize blogging – something called supporting data

I read the essay and was not only unimpressed, I was disappointed in Wired for even accepting this drivel as plausible. It really bothers me that someone would take their bully pulpit and write an essay – with no supporting data.

My hope is that Boutin and people like him who have either lost; or maybe never had, the whole idea of what blogging is all about keep heading off to Twitter land because in the end we won’t miss them. As said by Chris Crum over at Pure Blogging

…. Blogs are not obsolete. You know why? Because I still read them everyday. I still write for them nearly everyday. And so do countless others (that probably includes you). If you ask me, blogs are more relevant than they’ve ever been, because they are more mainstream than they have ever been.

Good bye Boutin and do us all a favour don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out.

No related posts.

Want To Know Why Twitter Keeps Going Down? They’re All Stoned

Duncan Riley — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:19:19 +0000

Via Valleywag, Twitter developer Alex Payne explains what the real problem with Twitter’s team maybe be drugs:

I guess that latest $15 million buys some serious weed. An explanation of “smoking a bowl” here, and remember, the next time Twitter is down, someone send the Twitter team munchies and water to straighten the team up so they can fix the problem. Also substitute “Twitter is down” with “the Twitter team is stoned again” during future outages…it has a more colorful ring to it