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josh quittner
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Josh Quittner
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josh quittner
exits
Ex-Business 2.0 editor leaves Fortune for Time
Josh Quittner, former editor of the defunct Business 2.0, has extricated himself from his unhappy stay at Fortune by returning to Time, where he previously worked. Tellingly, Time editor Rick Stengel refers to him as a "writer" for Fortune, though he had the ostensible title of executive editor. Stengel's memo is included below. Quittner's new gig is his old gig, covering consumer technology, which takes him back roughly 13 years in the progress of his career. Funny, because we'd heard that Quittner had held serious talks with Michael Arrington about joining TechCrunch, around the same time he wrote a laudatory column about the tech blogger. All that puffery, and no job in exchange? A shame. More »
conflicts of interest
Fortune columnist fails to disclose Arrington tie
Josh Quittner, the Fortune executive editor who's reportedly plotting his escape from his gilded cage at the magazine, has written a perfunctory profile of TechCrunch blog impresario Michael Arrington. Nothing we haven't read before — including the obligatory paragraph about Arrington's conflicts of interest in writing about startups even as he invests in them. Quittner observes that the practice seems to boost Arrington's reputation in the Valley. One conflict Quittner never mentions: As editor of Business 2.0, where I worked for him, he tried to strike a deal with Arrington to save the magazine by merging it with TechCrunch. The effort failed, landing Quittner at Fortune.
josh quittner
Ex-Business 2.0 editor dumping Fortune for housing blog?
What is Josh Quittner, the former editor of Business 2.0, doing for his next act? Since September, he's had an unhappy career at Fortune, the Time Inc.-owned corporate sibling which took him and a few other refugees from the magazine in. He's been earning what we hear is a mid-six-figures salary playing Scrabulous, and then writing about it. (Actual quote from a recent column: "Clearly, I had too much time on my hands.") The latest I'd heard on Quittner, my former boss, was that he was leaving Fortune to return to Time, where he worked before joining Business 2.0, as its Marin County-based tech correspondent. But he may have another exit strategy in mind. in 2006, Quittner registered roofmagazine.com. More »
nerdfight
Quittner "silenced," says Fortune colleague
An extraordinary public slap, rarely seen in the genteel world of magazine publisher Time Inc.: Fortune appears to have momentarily taken executive editor Josh Quittner's Techland blog away from him and handed it to rival tech writer David Kirkpatrick. Quittner's recent blog rant about Facebook's Beacon was wrongheaded enough, but entirely undeserving of this humiliation — republishing, duplicatively, a Fortune.com column by Kirkpatrick in Quittner's blog. Kirkpatrick, left, declared that Quittner, right, had been "silenced" on the Facebook issue. He went on to tear apart, at length, Quittner's argument. All the more shaming, because Kirkpatrick is — how to put this gently? — a laughingstock among his colleagues. More »
media
Facebook's foolish foes
I remember, distinctly, when former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner's love affair with Facebook began this spring. He couldn't stop talking about it, and I could hardly avoid hearing about it, since my office was next door to his. With all the zeal of a late convert, Quittner evangelized Facebook for most of this year — and now, feeling betrayed by Facebook's Beacon ads, he has attacked them with all the betrayed fury of a new apostate. Facebook is dead — to him, at any rate. Quittner's fickle rage perfectly captures the Silicon Valley hype cycle, and the press's complicity in it. Having buiilt up Facebook, Quittner and his fellow reporters must, inevitably tear it down. But in this latest episode, it's Facebook's critics, not Facebook, who have jumped the shark. More »
12:27 PM on Wed Dec 5 2007
By Owen Thomas
1,810 views,
6 comments
Latest by Davion: Facebook does have a couple old grey-hairs advising it. They like to stay out of the limelight, because they're Silicon Valley veterans and they know the press is stupid. One of them is from Accel - hint: it's more »
media
Fortune editor in town to boss ex-B2 staff around
Remember former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, whose tech magazine got shut down by parent company Time Inc.? Now an executive editor at Fortune, he outranks, on paper, assistant managing editor Jim Aley — the man he replaced as Business 2.0's editor five years ago. Which makes the following curious: The New York-based Aley, pictured above, is in town this week. Valleywag hears he started off his visit with a breakfast with Quittner. And then Aley met with the remnants of Business 2.0's staff, who now make up Fortune's San Francisco bureau — without Quittner. Remind us again who's in charge here? And if you want your startup written up in Fortune, who's the right guy to schmooze?
quincy smith
CBS Web chief bored when not buying startups
WEB 2.0 SUMMIT — In an interview with former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, Quincy Smith, the frenetically dealmaking CBS Web chief, looks so bored. So bored. As Quittner rambles on with a long, involved tale about his mancrush on awesomely geeky GigaOm blogger Om Malik, Smith is scanning the audience and jotting down notes, as if he's plotting, mid-panel, which startups he's going to buy at the show.
Former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner confirms our scoop that MySpace will not announce a software platform for third-party apps next week. According to Quittner's source, MySpace will instead reveal a "directory of apps" — what Quittner calls a "PR move" to show off internal MySpace programs. The main takeaway: TechCrunch was wrong — to the dismay of application developers, who are clearly enthusiastic for an alternative to Facebook. [Netly News]
Former Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner reports that Seth Goldstein's Facebook application Food Fight — in which you can throw virtual pies and other foodstuff at your friends — really took off after the addition of a "pile of poop" to the virtual arsenal. Ah, bullshit. [Netly News]
josh quittner
Time Inc. insults Business 2.0 editor one last time
Josh Quittner, the former editor of the late, lamented Business 2.0 — where, I'll disclose, I worked for seven years before joining Valleywag — has gotten one more kick in the pants from Time Inc., the tech magazine's publisher. In a cover wrap sent to subscribers with the last issue, he's listed as the magazine's "managing editor," even though he's always gone by the title of "editor" in the masthead. More »
media
A turnabout for Business 2.0's former boss
Time Inc. has officially announced Business 2.0's closure in an internal memo obtained by Jossip. In it, Time Inc. executive John Squires explains that folding in some of Business 2.0's staff into Fortune will give it "the largest San Francisco bureau of any major business publication." The Wall Street Journal bureau will still be twice its size, but never mind — we assume Squires meant "magazine." No, what's interesting in the memo is what's not said. More »
business 2.0
Facebook to the rescue!
Fans of Time Inc. tech title Business 2.0 have taken the bold step of starting a Facebook group to show their support for the troubled publication. So far, the group has amassed over 50 members, including Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, Quittner's wife, New York Times columnist Michelle Slatalla, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, and LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman. Oh, and former Business 2.0 editor and my new boss Owen Thomas. Let's hope this roster of Valley luminaries is more effective than other futile Facebook groups, such as the 29,359 people who believe strongly in removing the "is" from the Facebook status message.
apple
iPhone blowback
The clock is ticking on early adopters. If, like Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner, you've already tired of your iPhone, you only have seven more days to get your money back under Apple's strict returns policy. (Photo by Dan_H)
josh quittner
McDonalds.com prankster in Berkeley takeover bid
PAUL BOUTIN - Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner has an exit strategy: He's placed himself in the running for dean of UC Berkeley's journalism school. J-school wonks respect him for his decade with TIME, but I remember Josh Quittner as the guy who used a QuickCam to give me the finger online in 1995. That grainy photo, plus a timeline of JQ's decade of misbehavior after the jump. (You can attend Quittner's public presentation to the school on March 21. Don't be late - this is the guy who once made Steve Jobs reschedule a keynote.) More »
technorati
Loose Wires: How could a guy named Sparky Rose have a work history?
- Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]
- The campaign blog to free imprisoned medical marijuana dispenser Sparky Rose says that his prosecutors claim he had "no previous work history prior to the pot club." Rose was a high-rolling dot-com founder — same thing? [Free Sparky]
- CNET launches a new title called Crave, because the world needs yet another gadget blog. [Crave]
- Who wins the battle of YouTube vs. MySpace, now that the latter is aggressively moving into online video and breaking YouTube vids embedded on MySpace? Google wins, of course. [BusinessWeek]
- NY Times columnist Joe Nocera says Carly Fiorina's memoir of her time heading Hewlett-Packard is a revisionist history — she lies about earnings, he says, and her book should be called "It's All About Me." [NY Times Select]
- Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner will pay all his journalists to run their own blogs — presumably so no one else leaves like B2 writer Om Malik to start their own media empire. [I Want Media]
business 2.0
