When I worked for Quittner at Business 2.0, he talked constantly about his long-held dream of going to a startup or launching a blog. That he's now choosing to stay at magazine publisher Time Inc. is useful as an economic indicator. Quittner boosted the Valley's comeback, and the business of blogging, long before other mainstream journalists. That he's turned bearish on both now could be a sign of personal cowardice. Or keen prescience.

April 16, 2008

To: TIME Staff
From: Rick Stengel

I'm delighted to announce that Josh Quittner is coming back to TIME to cover consumer technology with a regular column in the magazine and a daily blog on TIME.com. In his new role as editor-at-large, Josh will apply his singular voice to technology, writing both reviews of new products and features that explain what's most important to consumers in Techland.

Most recently, Josh was the managing editor of Business 2.0 and a writer for FORTUNE. He first had a byline in TIME in 1994 as a staff writer covering technology, back at the very beginning of the internet. He went on to launch "The Netly News," first as a website on Pathfinder and later as a column in the magazine. He subsequently served as editor of TIME.com—twice—as well as tech editor of TIME before moving to San Francisco in 2002 to work for Business 2.0. Prior to coming to Time Inc., Josh worked at Newsday in the early 90s, where he wrote a pioneering column called "Life in Cyberspace."

Josh will continue to work from San Francisco where he lives with his wife, journalist Michelle Slatalla (with whom he has co-written five books) and their three daughters, but I expect he'll be in the New York offices regularly. Josh is a great mind and a great brand to have back at TIME. We're fortunate to have him.

R.S.

The domain name now points to a blog that's been active since March 10. The writers are "Slatalla" — almost certainly Michelle Slatalla, Quittner's wife — and "Roofie" — presumably Quittner. The prose matches his voice, and the subject fits, since Quittner took an active interest in real estate while at Business 2.0. But real estate is a bread-and-butter subject for Time Inc.'s finance magazines. Josh, rather than starting your own blog, why don't you just apply for a job at Money, run by your former deputy Eric Schurenberg? That seems easier.

None of them want to say anything, though. Why? By playing the house sycophant, Kirkpatrick takes the pressure off the rest of Fortune's staff to write the bootlicking tech-CEO profiles he's known for — like his recent mash note to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick's probing analysis of Zuckerberg? He's "nice."

The protests over Beacon, a program which reports users' activities on other websites to their friends on Facebook, have been compared to last year's fuss over news feed. In fact, there's no comparison: Actual complaints from users about Beacon have been far, far fewer. The introduction of a news feed was a radical change to Facebook's behavior. Beacon, which merely extends Facebook's reporting of activity on its site to others, does not change users' experience of the site in a dramatic way.

Facebook has been its own worst enemy — doing far more damage than any underemployed blogger could. The company made just about every conceivable mistake in the marketing of Beacon — from overhyping it to Madison Avenue, misleading advertisers about how optional it was for users, and failing to consider the consequences of reporting users' purchases to friends and family over the holiday shopping season.

Someone should take the fall for this. Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, in charge of marketing, has likened the introduction of Beacon to an experiment. "We want people to try it, to see it in action," he told the New York Times. "Our point of view is, let's give people the ability to sample it."

A sensible laboratory trial. But let's run a different experiment. Why did Beacon draw such a critical reaction from the press, while the news feed, a year ago, a much larger user revolt, make less of a splash? We can control for several variables.

Mark Zuckerberg, then as now, was CEO. PR head Brandee Barker, excoriated by Quittner and blogger Robert Scoble for the company's media relations, joined Facebook shortly before the news feed fuss. (It turns out that Scoble, who accused Barker of being unresponsive, never even even bothered to ask for an interview.) Owen Van Natta, then COO, now the company's chief revenue officer, was equally involved in both incidents, from what we hear.

The new variable in the Beacon trial is Palihapitiya himself, who joined the company just a few months ago after a long career at AOL. He's clearly a talented executive, trained in the new school of marketing through scientific thinking and quantitative analysis. Try something, and if it fails, discard it and move on. Perhaps that's what Zuckerberg should do with Palihapitiya.

At best, it's careless; at worst, a deliberate slap. Add it to the list of ways Quittner, a difficult, mischievous, but endlessly creative personality who arguably saved the magazine (and, with it, my career) from a much-earlier death, has been treated disgracefully by his employer. The only mystery: Why is he sticking around, save for the New-York-media-level salary?

Former B2 editor Josh Quittner, left, will get the title of executive editor, and Squires gives props to his tech chops in the memo. But Squires doesn't mention that as such, Quittner will be effectively outranked by his predecessor, Jim Aley, right, who departed B2 abruptly in 2002 to rejoin Fortune after Quittner arrived to take over the magazine. From what we hear, Aley, an assistant managing editor and the director of Fortune's technology coverage, will be the de facto boss of the tech-focused bureau, not Quittner. (Full disclosure: Before joining Valleywag, I worked for both Aley and Quittner at Business 2.0.)

Josh Quittner's alt.bio

• Early 1994: Pens classic early Wired tale, The War Between alt.tasteless and rec.pets.cats.

  It takes a particular kind of genius ... to shock people who have devoted a lifetime to collecting revolting facts, disgusting jokes, and synonyms for the word "penis."

• Late 1994: Registers mcdonalds.com after the company repeatedly ignores his warnings.

  
  $whois mcdonalds.com
  Domain Name: MCDONALDS.COM
  Administrative Contact: Quittner, Josh quit@newsday.com

• May 1995: Overblown Tom Wolfe 2.0 essay, The Birth of Way New Journalism, nonetheless shows that Quittner understood a dozen years ago how Web journalism would eventually differ from its print and broadcast predecessors.
• Oct 1995: During the launch of TIME's official online experiment, The Netly News, Quittner gets into a food fight with Wired's unofficial online experiment, Suck.

  

  So we yanked out Noah's QuickCam, took a picture of the three of us giving a one-finger salute to the Duke, and uploaded it to the URL to which Suck pointed. Now, when anyone clicked on a Netly link, they'd be greeted with the rude image of us and the exhortation, "Dear Duke: Suck on this!"

• 1996-2001: TIME stuff no one remembers now.
• January 2002: Not only does Quittner get an exclusive cover story on the new flat-panel iMacs for TIME, not only does he get Jobs to reschedule the launch event to fit TIME's onstand schedule, but thanks to an inattentive Canadian sysadmin Quittner actually breaks the story before Jobs takes the stage! This, people, is the stuff j-schoolers dream about pulling off.

  

• October 2006: Issues Business 2.0 requirement that all reporters must blog. The move is mind-numbingly dull to bloggers and Web surfers, but to print reporters he's as crazy as that guy who translated the Bible into English. It's just not done!

• 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]

But what does Josh wear down there? New York may care about Michelle Slatalla's underwear, but it's her husband's undies that Silicon Valley wants to get into (um, metaphorically). Good thing he has Instant Messenger.

Valleywag: You're used to your wife writing about your undies discussions with her?

Josh: I encourage it.
Josh: It keeps the marriage fresh.

Valleywag: So did you two talk about YOUR underwear?

Josh: It's not really a Styles column. Go figure.

Valleywag: Then you have the perfect forum here to discuss your own.
Valleywag: Boxers or briefs, Josh?

Josh: Boxers, of course
[Josh types something but erases it.]

Valleywag: no, go on

Josh: This seems to be overstimulating for you. And i refuse to go on unless you PAY ME.

Since Valleywag has a strict policy of being cheap, the interview had to end.

He Says Lingerie, I Say Underwear [NYT]