Valleywag
Encyclopedia
Valleywag was a Gawker Media
blog
with gossip and news about Silicon Valley
personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas himself left in May 2009, to be replaced by Ryan Tate. It was the first to break some stories, such as the leaking of a Gene Simmons
sex tape. However, it has been criticized for broadcasting unsubstantiated and damaging gossip about people who are not in the public eye, such as a college intern who falsely called in sick to work and had it publicized across the Internet by Valleywag. The blog ceased operating in February 2011, and the URL now directs to a Gawker page with a selection of technology industry themed stories.
In its first post, Valleywag outed the fact that Google
founder Larry Page
and high-ranking employee Marissa Mayer
had dated for months. It shortly followed that with the revelation that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had an apparently open marriage
and had joined a church (as documented on a Web page in Google's cache) with a girlfriend. The point of these articles was that the reporters and editors who covered Silicon Valley were well aware of these relationships and their potential impact on Google's stock price and brand reputation. But they had tacitly agreed not to report them in order to curry favor with Google staff. Another popular early series of items pitted "famous for the Internet" tech celebrities against each other in beauty contests.
In November 2006, Douglas was fired. An internal memo about the departure surfaced, suggesting Douglas had become too focused on a small group of Internet entrepreneurs who had befriended him to get press coverage. The memo also quoted an interview he gave the R.U. Sirius Show (republished on a sister web site 10 Zen Monkeys) in which Douglas had joked that one of his goals for Valleywag was to get sued.
Gawker founder Nick Denton
took over the editing duties until a replacement editor could be found. Douglas remained on as a part-time contributor. Under his reign, Denton broke such stories as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attempt to detain a Wall Street Journal reporter, claiming that reporters were sitting on this story. Denton also recruited national magazine writer Paul Boutin to post a daily "Silicon Valley Users Guide" feature on local customs, politics and places, though Boutin subsequently dropped the column when he briefly rejoined Wired.
In July 2007, Owen Thomas, formerly Business 2.0's online editor, with a career that stretched from Suck.com and Wired to Time and the Red Herring, assumed the role of managing editor. He added several staff members and contributors, "very special correspondent" Paul Boutin, associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West. In September 2007, Boutin published a list of 40 companies to be showcased by rival publication TechCrunch
at a conference, again suggesting that reporters and bloggers were keeping the list—on display at the conference site—from their readers to gain favor with TechCrunch and the companies.
Valleywag posted a link to its automated traffic stats on its front page. In March 2008, stats showed an average of 131,000 visits and 189,000 pageviews per day, with 2 million visits and 3 million pageviews in December. It is one of the top 100 technology news sites, according to Techmeme
. Mainstream technology reporters John Markoff
, Walt Mossberg and David Pogue
acknowledged that they read the site regularly, and had their emails to Valleywag published on the site.
In fall 2008, associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant were laid off, leaving Owen Thomas and Paul Boutin to run the site. This was part of an overall restructuring by Gawker Media, described in a memo by Nick Denton as shifting resources to the most commercially successful Gawker sites, away from the focus on increasing traffic, in view of the 2008 credit crisis.
On November 12, Nick Denton
informed Owen Thomas that Valleywag would be folded, laying off Paul Boutin, with Thomas taking over a column on its parent site Gawker.
was outed as the true author. Stating he "ought to have known better", Owen Thomas falsely reported that a drunk employee caused a major power outage at data center 365 Main by relying on the gossip of an unidentified source. Industry analyst and speaker Dave Taylor, who runs several technical and business websites, pointed out, "In journalism school, you would never even think about sharing any gossip of this nature without at least two reliable sources, but that never stopped Owen, nor did it stop other bloggers from picking up the incendiary story and shining a very negative light on the Web server hosting company in question."
Under Thomas, the site become known for unsubstantiated gossip and "linkbait", or stories whose substance lay solely in the title, making it a tempting link for other on-line sites but that effectively only "baited" traffic to Valleywag. A small-but-influential tech website hosted by Y Combinator
, Hacker News
, recently banned stories from Valleywag. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title.” Sixty percent of Hacker News readers voted yes to the ban.
Several Silicon Valley
writers questioned the tactics of Valleywag and similar sites, especially in the wake of the suicide death of executive Paul Tilley, who came under fierce attacks from anonymous bloggers. Writing in TechCrunch, Michael Arrington
, himself a focus of Valleywag's posts, wondered when Valleywag would be the cause of a suicide
:
Internet marketing expert Andy Beal responded to Arrington's column on his website MarketingPilgrim.com:
Responding in The Daily Telegraph
technology blog, Shane Richmond felt Arrington had a conflict-of-interest in writing the column: "As for Mr Arrington's suggestion, which basically amounts to 'I wish everyone would be nicer', I imagine it's largely motivated by the fact that, as he acknowledges in his post, he's a frequent target of Valleywag himself."
-savvy boss, a story that has been viewed over 680,000 times. In February 2007, Valleywag reported that a Gene Simmons sex tape had been leaked on the Web -- and then published a cease-and-desist letter from Simmons's lawyer as proof of its authenticity. In spring 2008, Valleywag ran a series of articles on Wikipedia
co-founder Jimmy Wales
, alleging that he traded favorable edits for sexual favors and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
.
Gawker Media
Gawker Media is an American online media company and blog network, founded and owned by Nick Denton based in New York City. It is considered to be one of the most visible and successful blog-oriented media companies. , it is the parent company for 11 different weblogs: Gawker.com, Fleshbot,...
blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
with gossip and news about Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas himself left in May 2009, to be replaced by Ryan Tate. It was the first to break some stories, such as the leaking of a Gene Simmons
Gene Simmons
Gene Simmons is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, singer-songwriter, actor, and rock bassist. Known as "The Demon", he is the bassist/vocalist of Kiss, a hard rock band he co-founded in the early 1970s.-Early life:...
sex tape. However, it has been criticized for broadcasting unsubstantiated and damaging gossip about people who are not in the public eye, such as a college intern who falsely called in sick to work and had it publicized across the Internet by Valleywag. The blog ceased operating in February 2011, and the URL now directs to a Gawker page with a selection of technology industry themed stories.
Background
Valleywag launched in February 2006 with editor Nick Douglas. As a college student, Douglas had edited a blog-focused gossip blog called Blogebrity.In its first post, Valleywag outed the fact that Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
founder Larry Page
Larry Page
Lawrence "Larry" Page is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the chief executive of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011...
and high-ranking employee Marissa Mayer
Marissa Mayer
Marissa Ann Mayer is Vice President of Location and Local Services at the search engine company Google. She has become one of the public faces of Google, providing a number of press interviews and appearing at events frequently to speak on behalf of the company.-Education and career :After...
had dated for months. It shortly followed that with the revelation that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had an apparently open marriage
Open marriage
Open marriage typically refers to a marriage in which the partners agree that each may engage in extramarital sexual relationships, without this being regarded as infidelity. There are many different styles of open marriage, with the partners having varying levels of input on their spouse's...
and had joined a church (as documented on a Web page in Google's cache) with a girlfriend. The point of these articles was that the reporters and editors who covered Silicon Valley were well aware of these relationships and their potential impact on Google's stock price and brand reputation. But they had tacitly agreed not to report them in order to curry favor with Google staff. Another popular early series of items pitted "famous for the Internet" tech celebrities against each other in beauty contests.
In November 2006, Douglas was fired. An internal memo about the departure surfaced, suggesting Douglas had become too focused on a small group of Internet entrepreneurs who had befriended him to get press coverage. The memo also quoted an interview he gave the R.U. Sirius Show (republished on a sister web site 10 Zen Monkeys) in which Douglas had joked that one of his goals for Valleywag was to get sued.
Gawker founder Nick Denton
Nick Denton
Nick Denton, born August 24, 1966, is a British journalist and internet entrepreneur, the founder and proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com...
took over the editing duties until a replacement editor could be found. Douglas remained on as a part-time contributor. Under his reign, Denton broke such stories as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attempt to detain a Wall Street Journal reporter, claiming that reporters were sitting on this story. Denton also recruited national magazine writer Paul Boutin to post a daily "Silicon Valley Users Guide" feature on local customs, politics and places, though Boutin subsequently dropped the column when he briefly rejoined Wired.
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
at a conference, again suggesting that reporters and bloggers were keeping the list—on display at the conference site—from their readers to gain favor with TechCrunch and the companies.
Valleywag posted a link to its automated traffic stats on its front page. In March 2008, stats showed an average of 131,000 visits and 189,000 pageviews per day, with 2 million visits and 3 million pageviews in December. It is one of the top 100 technology news sites, according to Techmeme
Techmeme
Techmeme is a technology news aggregator. The website has been described as "a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation".-Overview:...
. Mainstream technology reporters John Markoff
John Markoff
John Markoff is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.- Biography :...
, Walt Mossberg and David Pogue
David Pogue
David Welch Pogue is an American technology writer, technology columnist and commentator. He is a personal technology columnist for the New York Times, an Emmy-winning tech correspondent for CBS News Sunday Morning, weekly tech correspondent for CNBC, and a columnist for Scientific American...
acknowledged that they read the site regularly, and had their emails to Valleywag published on the site.
In fall 2008, associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant were laid off, leaving Owen Thomas and Paul Boutin to run the site. This was part of an overall restructuring by Gawker Media, described in a memo by Nick Denton as shifting resources to the most commercially successful Gawker sites, away from the focus on increasing traffic, in view of the 2008 credit crisis.
On November 12, Nick Denton
Nick Denton
Nick Denton, born August 24, 1966, is a British journalist and internet entrepreneur, the founder and proprietor of the blog collective Gawker Media, and the managing editor of the New York-based Gawker.com...
informed Owen Thomas that Valleywag would be folded, laying off Paul Boutin, with Thomas taking over a column on its parent site Gawker.
Criticism and controversy
The website made several high-profile mistakes. Editor Nick Denton twice misreported the identity of the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, before Daniel LyonsDaniel Lyons
Daniel Lyons is an American writer. He was a senior editor at Forbes magazine and is now a writer at Newsweek.-Career:He has written a book of short stories, The Last Good Man , a novel, Dog Days , and a fictional biography, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody...
was outed as the true author. Stating he "ought to have known better", Owen Thomas falsely reported that a drunk employee caused a major power outage at data center 365 Main by relying on the gossip of an unidentified source. Industry analyst and speaker Dave Taylor, who runs several technical and business websites, pointed out, "In journalism school, you would never even think about sharing any gossip of this nature without at least two reliable sources, but that never stopped Owen, nor did it stop other bloggers from picking up the incendiary story and shining a very negative light on the Web server hosting company in question."
Under Thomas, the site become known for unsubstantiated gossip and "linkbait", or stories whose substance lay solely in the title, making it a tempting link for other on-line sites but that effectively only "baited" traffic to Valleywag. A small-but-influential tech website hosted by Y Combinator
Y Combinator
Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in March 2005. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year...
, Hacker News
Hacker News
Hacker News is a social news website about computer hacking and startup companies, run by Paul Graham's funding firm Y Combinator. It is different from other social news websites in that there is no option to down vote submissions; submissions can either be voted up or not voted on at all...
, recently banned stories from Valleywag. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham wrote “Several users have suggested we ban Valleywag, not for anything in particular that they write about, but because their articles are always such deliberate linkbait. I personally agree. In 99% of Valleywag articles, the most interesting thing is the title.” Sixty percent of Hacker News readers voted yes to the ban.
Several Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a term which refers to the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations...
writers questioned the tactics of Valleywag and similar sites, especially in the wake of the suicide death of executive Paul Tilley, who came under fierce attacks from anonymous bloggers. Writing in TechCrunch, Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arrington is the founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere...
, himself a focus of Valleywag's posts, wondered when Valleywag would be the cause of a suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
:
[For] people in Silicon Valley, who are not celebrities and who have no desire other than to build a great startup, a post on Valleywag comes as a huge shock. Seeing your marriage woes, DUIDriving under the influenceDriving under the influence is the act of driving a motor vehicle with blood levels of alcohol in excess of a legal limit...
or employment termination up on a popular public website (permanently indexed by search engines) is simply more than they can handle. They have not had the ramp up time to build resistance to the attacks.
Internet marketing expert Andy Beal responded to Arrington's column on his website MarketingPilgrim.com:
Perhaps all bloggers–in fact, all journalists– should stop and consider the personal psychological harm our words might have on an individual. While it’s easy for us to post our scathing criticisms. we’re often desensitized to the harm we inflict–simply because we’re miles away, safe behind our web browser.
Responding in The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is a daily morning broadsheet newspaper distributed throughout the United Kingdom and internationally. The newspaper was founded by Arthur B...
technology blog, Shane Richmond felt Arrington had a conflict-of-interest in writing the column: "As for Mr Arrington's suggestion, which basically amounts to 'I wish everyone would be nicer', I imagine it's largely motivated by the fact that, as he acknowledges in his post, he's a frequent target of Valleywag himself."
Breaking stories
In November 2007, the blog told the story of a bank intern whose excuse for missing work was discovered by his FacebookFacebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
-savvy boss, a story that has been viewed over 680,000 times. In February 2007, Valleywag reported that a Gene Simmons sex tape had been leaked on the Web -- and then published a cease-and-desist letter from Simmons's lawyer as proof of its authenticity. In spring 2008, Valleywag ran a series of articles on Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
co-founder Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, alleging that he traded favorable edits for sexual favors and donations to the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
.
External links
- valleywag - Gawker
- Profile of Valleywag and Nick Douglas in BusinessWeekBusinessWeekBloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...