Valleywag
new york, minute
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new york, minute
media
Bloomberg sale spells profitable future of journalism by numbers
Merrill Lynch, under financial pressure, is selling one of its more valuable assets, a 20 percent stake in Bloomberg, the financial-information business, for $4.5 billion to $5 billion. The sale marks the business's value at $22 billion to $25 billion — four times or more what Rupert Murdoch paid to tuck the Wall Street Journal's publisher, Dow Jones, a far more prestigious name in business news, into News Corp. Under Murdoch's ownership, Journal staffers are groaning about new expectations for productivity. Several highly paid, but not highly prolific, writers have been laid off, including George Anders, one of the biggest names in technology reporting. Join the club, Bloomberg writers would say; they are constantly measured, and perpetually disgruntled. What Bloomberg's high valuation tells us: Expectations of productivity in the news business are here to stay. Prestige and quality are well enough — but only if they make a noticeable difference. Being read matters just as much as being right. More »
2:00 PM on Wed Jul 16 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,372 views,
2 comments
Latest by raincoaster: Norm Pearlstine, formerly of the WSJ. What a tiny, incestuous circle it is. Bloomberg is a brutal company to work for, I'm told, but they're the best place to get my Michael Lewis fix, so they have me by the ovaries. more »
social networks
British gossips may lose access to juicy stories sourced from Bebo, Facebook
Amanda Hudson allowed teenage daughter Jodie Hudson to throw a birthday bash at the British family's £4.4 million ($8.7 million) villa in Spain, but when pictures like this of underage drinkers passed out on the floor and accounts of stolen jewelry appeared in Blighty tabloids, the elder Hudson brought suit, alleging defamation under the U.K.'s strict libel laws. The fishwraps will hide behind local "fair comment" provisions, which indemnifies the retellers of factual accounts — the problem is, the accounts posted by daughter Jodie and friends to social networks like Bebo and Facebook may have been less than strictly factual. And, of course, the photos are protected under copyright provisions. Which may mean that British hacks might have to factcheck anything gleaned from websites. I can only hope this is one legal precedent that they don't export to the colonies.
envy
Does Nick Denton wish he were Peter Thiel?
"Thiel makes me sick!" read the note from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton. His oddly personal declaration was prompted by a brief in the New York Post about former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel's success as a hedge-fund manager. Thiel will make an estimated $500 million this year running Clarium Capital, a hedge fund. (We reported this a few weeks ago, boss.) It hit me hard: Could Denton actually be jealous of Thiel? More »
1:20 PM on Fri Jul 11 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,539 views,
11 comments
paidcontent.org
Nonprofit business gets into not-so-profitable one
Is blogging the future of the media business? If so, it's in a very small way. That's what I gather from the purchase by Guardian Media Group, a British ink-on-dead-trees concern, of PaidContent.org for $30 million or so. It's a satisfying outcome for Rafat Ali, PaidContent's founder; he now has bragging rights to a bigger blog deal than the sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million by Jason Calacanis, his former boss. More »
blogging for dollars
PaidContent raises blog sale bet to $30 million -- who's next?
ContentNext, the parent of media technology blog PaidContent, was purchased by the UK's Guardian Media for $30 million, pending the site meeting performance expectations in the coming months. The company will continue to report independently in the meantime under new CEO Nathan Richardson and the editorial direction of founders Rafat Ali. It's certainly more than the $15 million deal blog prospector Michael Arrington thought would only afford Ali, Kramer and Co. "spending money," and it's in line with other recent deals such as MediaBistro's $25 million sale to Jupiter and ArsTechnica's $25-30 million sale to Condé Nast. So, which tech news entrepreneur might follow? More »
online advertising
Company-saving Yahoo AMP needs a new new name
Just before Microsoft announced its bid to acquire Yahoo in February, Yahoo held a quarterly earnings call with analysts. On that call, president Sue Decker essentially promised that a new Yahoo brand-advertising buying tool, codenamed "Project Apex," would finally turn around the company. In like 10 months or so. In April, we heard that the project was underfunded and going nowhere. Instead of putting, say, more engineers on the project, Yahoo marketers decided they needed to "awesomize" Project Apex in order to wow investors and stave off Microsoft. They changed the product's name to Yahoo AMP and even released a video, embedded above. It's back to the "awesomizing" table, Yahoos, because AMP needs a new name. More »
loren feldman
"TechNigga" comic's made-for-Valleywag video
Disgraced video comic Loren Feldman has been removed from Verizon's phone and broadband video-on-demand library. I wouldn't compare the guy to Lenny Bruce, but this much is true: Feldman, a member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the risqué Friars Club in New York, goes out of his way to be offensive and sometimes it works. OK, so sometimes it doesn't. His year-old "TechNigga" clip, which Verizon didn't even carry, got Feldman axed from the lineup. "TechNigga" consisted of a Jew portraying a stereotypical black thug — booze, dope, hookers, etc. What could go wrong? Far funnier and less awwwwwwkward is Feldman's puppet interview with Jason Calacanis's bulldogs from April. The puppet host is a spoof of marketing consultant Shel Israel. At this point, you either know all about Shel and his contempt for Feldman, or you don't care. Just watch the video. More »
loren feldman
"TechNigga" video gets 1938 Media removed from Verizon
1938 Media is a one-man videoblog run by Loren Feldman. The guy is funny, in that edgily-offensive way that makes you wonder when someone's going to punch him in the face. Last week, Verizon cut a deal with Feldman to market his videos on Verizon phones and broadband connections — a big win for a one-man act. But eight days later, 1938's clips are gone from Verizon. The reason? A backlash from activist groups who've branded Feldman's shtick as racist. A year ago, Feldman posted "TechNigga," in which he pandered to stereotypes in an attempt to parody TechCrunch. The video wasn't in Verizon's collection of 1938 clips, and Feldman long ago made his apologies. Protesters don't care. Watch the first 1:05 of "TechNigga" and you'll understand everything.
clay felker
Blogging Old Media KILLS!
Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure they've been lovingly crafting it for years — is that rare article worth reading beyond the first 100 words. You think Perez Hilton's nuts? Read up on Felker's career.
More »
real estate
Fox Interactive's $350 million new offices
Poor Yahoo can't even keep tenants at the Yahoo Center in Santa Monica — Fox Interactive Media will be moving all 2,000 of its Los Angeles-area employees to the as-yet-uncompleted Horizon at Playa Vista office park in Playa Del Rey. The deal, which Peter Levinsohn calls "the biggest deal in LA real estate in 25 years," is worth $350 million according to sources cited by the Los Angeles Times. The planned complex, situated between Culver City and LAX, will also host a retail complex, making it easy for FIM employees to buy the products with the paychecks funded by the advertising for those products, thereby completing the great Southland circle of life.
books
O'Reilly writer dodges trademark claim
In his book on project management, Making Things Happen, O'Reilly author Scott Berkun advises readers to create an environment "where people are comfortable being ambitious, but will admit to and take responsibility for their mistakes." Failing that, one can always take the fifth when a mistake occurs and distract folks with a contest. In announcing the contest, Berkun told readers he couldn't explain why the title of the second edition of his The Art of Project Management mysteriously changed to Making Things Happen earlier this year. More »
glam.com
Glam.com CEO so pretty in pink
He says he invented the term "website," practices zazen meditation, and would have us believe he would accessorize his custom tailored duds with pink even if it weren't the official color of his Web site. In a gushy profile of girly ad platform Glam.com's founder Samir Arora by the London Times, Arora's over-glossed sense of worth is rivaled only by the rumored $1.3 billion price tag on his company. Which, by the looks of the press rampage Glam is on, is as bolstered by frothy tidbits of their founder's "glam" lifestyle as it is by the slippery story that Glam has cornered the women's market online — which they haven't.
rumormonger
Report: Yahoo search scientist Qi Lu will leave next
Now that Google is to run the most profitable parts of Yahoo search advertising, what's a Yahoo search scientist like Qi Lu to do? Leave the company. Sources tell BoomTown that Lu is also mapping his way out of Big Purple, following following the Flickr founders, Usama Fayyad and Jeff Weiner. It's a big blow. One former Yahoo employee who yawned over Fayyad's departure tells us: "Now Qi Lu, on the other hand. People would go to war for him." More »
media
NBC contractor broke Tim Russert death on Wikipedia first
A half-hour before the news broadcast on NBC, a Wikipedia user hailing from IP address 66.187.200.74 updated NBC's Tim Russert's page to report the newsman's death. Scooped by the world's most authoritative guide to Idaho wine? How embarrassing for NBC. How worrisome for one of its contractors. See, the IP address 66.187.200.74 belongs to a company called Internet Broadcasting, which maintains some of NBC's local news websites. Not a very good way to keep a news organization as a customer.
Glam Scam
Glam acquires U.K. ad network, at cost of female demographic
Can Glam Media keep up the pretense of being a way for advertisers to reach a mostly female audience much longer? The ad network has used some of its latest $85 million in debt and equity funding to acquire London-based Monetise. Monetise is an ad network that buys inventory low, aggregates it, and then sells it a bit higher — just like Glam! Except that Monetise's clients are outfits like Flixster, TVGuide.co.uk, and ArtistDirect — none of which sound like they serve overwhelmingly female audiences. The move does allow Glam to grow its raw numbers of represented sites at such a pace that clueless investors may continue funding it at ridiculously high valuations, giving Glam more cash to continue the process — until someday, somebody buys the whole thing and the founders walk away. More »
There's no such thing as bad publicity, but over such a boring blog post?
Jason Harris, a freelancer for GigaOm's Web Worker Daily site, was caught plagiarizing an article about Gmail. The truly sad part: This is the first time we've heard someone mention Web Worker Daily in months. [Regret the Error]
housekeeping
