Valleywag
once you're lucky, twice you're good
Posts Tagged “
Nick Denton
”
once you're lucky, twice you're good
Valleywag emeritus offers unsolicited advice for Michael Arrington
Newly softhearted Gawker Media head Nick Denton offers some kindly advice for TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington: "@Michael Arrington: Hey, everybody has been expecting the grand roll-up ever since you hired Heather. I don't see it happening. Certainly don't see it sticking. And, without a roll-up, you have a niche Valley site with some 3% of the traffic of Gawker or Weblogs Inc. Good luck with that when the tech bubble bursts!"
Newly softhearted Gawker Media head Nick Denton offers some kindly advice for TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington: "@Michael Arrington: Hey, everybody has been expecting the grand roll-up ever since you hired Heather. I don't see it happening. Certainly don't see it sticking. And, without a roll-up, you have a niche Valley site with some 3% of the traffic of Gawker or Weblogs Inc. Good luck with that when the tech bubble bursts!"
blogging for dollars
Nick "The Slasher" Denton cuts loose three blogs: Gridskipper, Idolator, and Wonkette
Is Nick Denton going soft? Even his cutbacks are sentimental these days. In the old days, Denton, the publisher of Valleywag and 14 other Gawker Media blogs, would simply shutter blogs. These days, he worries first about finding them nice homes. Such is the velvet-glove treatment he's giving Gridskipper, Wonkette, and Idolator, his blogs about, respectively, travel, politics, and music. The three blogs amount to less than 3 percent of Gawker Media's traffic, he says. Fine, so why keep them around in any form? Silicon Alley Insider has the details on their new owners. More evidence of Denton's increasing namby-pambosity: Instead of threatening to fire leakers, he's encouraging us to post the internal memo announcing the move. Darling bossman, that's no fun. But also no reason to keep the memo from you, dear readers: More »
blogging for dollars
Calacanis explains how Denton rips off his writers with "best pay in the business"
The week's not complete until bulldog-cute Mahalo chief Jason Calacanis writes in. Today JC emailed twice to call out a gaping hole in the much-discussed New Dentonomics of our 2008 Valleywag pay scale. His numbers are out of date; our new pageview rate for the second quarter is in, and it's $6.50 per thousand pageviews. But Calacanis spotted a bigger slap to the face than the CPM, one so big that Portfolio blogger Felix Salmon will have to do a whole 'nother post now to say he knew it all along. Can you guess what it is?More »
great moments in journalism
Today's five meanest April Fools' pranks
For some of the Web's more respected names, it's a really special day. They get to treat their readers and fans with the contempt they hide most of the year. Below, five pranks today that show just how much the Internet hates you. And I do mean you. More »
breakdowns
Valleywag brought down by outage -- editor blames sci-fi fans
Coincidentally, the Valleywag crew was chatting in Campfire about how much we loved a new site we'd discovered, Downforeveryoneorjustme.com, right before we had to use it on our own site. Some theories we came up with: Nick Denton, Gawker Media's owner and publisher of Valleywag, likes to bring down his sites occasionally just to watch how his editors deal with the unbearable pressure of not being able to write. As part of Jason Calacanis's new Valleywag charm campaign, Mahalo guides posted so many links to us that it brought the site down. Or, most plausibly, outraged Arthur C. Clarke fans launched a denial-of-service campaign against the unremarkable observation that the deceased sci-fi writer was an admitted pedophile.
quotable
Jason Calacanis wants to hug Nick Denton
New strategy for dealing with Nick Denton: everyone give him a HUGE 30second hug. We will hug the love back into him (nick carlson's idea!)Yeah Jason, you know just how to deal with people. Oh, and nothing against my boss's boss, but I'd rather hug Taurus and Fondue. [Twitter]
blogging for dollars
Valleywag seeking $10 million among VC blog feeding frenzy
What is Michael Arrington smoking? His self-indulgent fantasy: All the bloggers should band together into a "dream team," owning equity in the joint venture. "Someone needs to pony up a big round of financing around an existing blog, or perhaps a new entity, and then start rolling them up into a big fat CNET crushing $200 million/year in revenue business," he writes. That existing blog he has in mind is obviously TechCrunch, though he never comes out and says it. What pushed him into this delusion? A rumor that Silicon Alley Insider is raising a $3 million to $5 million round and that PaidContent is also seeking more financing, a charge founder Rafat Ali doesn't exactly deny. Arrington doesn't want his competitors to raise money, because that will screw his ambitions for a big blog rollup. More »
news flash
... but not as bitchy as former Valleywag editor Nick Denton. This according to definitively bitchy MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. He just friended me on Facebook, so I guess I'm bitchy enough. More »
Valleywag editor is "a bitchy young man"
... but not as bitchy as former Valleywag editor Nick Denton. This according to definitively bitchy MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin. He just friended me on Facebook, so I guess I'm bitchy enough. More »
your privacy is an illusion
My boss, Nick Denton, may be banned from Facebook, for posting photos of Emily Brill, daughter of entrepreneur Steve Brill. Insiders at the social network tell me that they have considered similar sanctions against me, especially after I posted the story of Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker befriending her Microsoft counterpart, Adam Sohn, shortly before Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. In solidarity, I'll now take a similar risk by posting this charming photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, taken while the two were goofing off during a BusinessWeek photo shoot.
More »
Facebook bullies writers, not its engineers, to keep data private
My boss, Nick Denton, may be banned from Facebook, for posting photos of Emily Brill, daughter of entrepreneur Steve Brill. Insiders at the social network tell me that they have considered similar sanctions against me, especially after I posted the story of Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker befriending her Microsoft counterpart, Adam Sohn, shortly before Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. In solidarity, I'll now take a similar risk by posting this charming photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, taken while the two were goofing off during a BusinessWeek photo shoot.
More »
paul boutin
Why I hate you -- and I do mean you
Entrepreneurs. Engineers. Bloggers. You keep asking: Why does a writer like me hate people like you? Nick Denton's new traffic-based pay scale has backfired wonderfully, giving me a few minutes to explain it. More »
9:54 AM on Thu Jan 10 2008
By Paul Boutin
2,880 views,
19 comments
Nick Denton likes his blogs a bit dark. But his readers seem to disagree. io9, Gawker Media's sci-fi blog, has been its most successful launch to date, with 750,000 pageviews, followed closely by Jezebel. Shiny, happy futurism and go-girl feminism sell better than bleak wit and sardonic jabs at the powers that be.
your privacy is an illusion
At last, I've received a real-life, actual Beacon message — the controversial Facebook ad format that reports on your friends' activities elsewhere on the Web. The news flash? My boss, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, is going to see Will Smith thriller I Am Legend. This ruins my arthouse-film image of him. Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg!
Facebook ad reveals blog mogul's bad taste in movies
At last, I've received a real-life, actual Beacon message — the controversial Facebook ad format that reports on your friends' activities elsewhere on the Web. The news flash? My boss, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, is going to see Will Smith thriller I Am Legend. This ruins my arthouse-film image of him. Damn you, Mark Zuckerberg!
wrapup
Valleywag's 3 biggest goofs of 2007
The trick to running a gossip blog is to reject most of the rumors you get. Otherwise, no one believes anything. You quickly learn to spot the gullible chatter, the obvious attempts to plant a story, the too good to be true. Well, usually. We blew it big three times this year by trying too hard for the scoops. More »
7:24 PM on Sun Dec 23 2007
By Paul Boutin
2,318 views,
2 comments
hires
Nick Denton to blog again at Gawker
The New York Times reports that Valleywag emeritus Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media and my boss, will take over as editor of Gawker.com, his flagship and our sister site, on January 2. My first reaction to the news: Well, good. This should keep him busy. More »
chacha
Hoosier daddy? Indiana reporter trades university beat for university job
When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage, and came to similar conclusions: Although nothing legally wrong occurred, IU officials' failure to disclose their ChaCha ties was suspicious. However, since then the newspaper has provided the issue little attention. Why? More »
brooke hammerling
These days, a startup raising $1.5 million hardly seems noteworthy, so I was inclined to dismiss the news that Curbed Network, a New York-based blog franchise, had brought in that modest amount. This despite the fact that Lockhart Steele, Curbed's cofounder, is a friend and helped recruit me to Valleywag when he worked at Gawker Media, and Nick Denton, Valleywag's owner, is one of the investors in this round. No, I was more intrigued by the name of another investor: Zach Nelson, the Larry Ellison protégé who's CEO of NetSuite, the Web-based software company which has filed to go public. How could these two have possibly connected? A quick reading of the social graph revealed only one candidate: Brooke Hammerling, the hyperconnected founder of Brew PR and Valleywag's original Snacky Flack. The coast-swapping Hammerling says her career as a yentapreneur began when she invited Steele, a baseball fan, to an Oakland A's event hosted by Nelson. Hope you got a cut, Brooke.
Silicon Valley's secret matchmaker
These days, a startup raising $1.5 million hardly seems noteworthy, so I was inclined to dismiss the news that Curbed Network, a New York-based blog franchise, had brought in that modest amount. This despite the fact that Lockhart Steele, Curbed's cofounder, is a friend and helped recruit me to Valleywag when he worked at Gawker Media, and Nick Denton, Valleywag's owner, is one of the investors in this round. No, I was more intrigued by the name of another investor: Zach Nelson, the Larry Ellison protégé who's CEO of NetSuite, the Web-based software company which has filed to go public. How could these two have possibly connected? A quick reading of the social graph revealed only one candidate: Brooke Hammerling, the hyperconnected founder of Brew PR and Valleywag's original Snacky Flack. The coast-swapping Hammerling says her career as a yentapreneur began when she invited Steele, a baseball fan, to an Oakland A's event hosted by Nelson. Hope you got a cut, Brooke.
fake steve jobs
The best part of this interview with Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor behind Fake Steve Jobs? Where he describes how he tormented my boss, Nick Denton, by slipping in more and more British slang into The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs in an effort to throw him off the trail. Which, of course, succeeded brilliantly. To keep things balanced, Lyons also takes the piss out of Jason Calacanis. How anyone could hate the bulldog-cute entrepreneur that much is beyond me.
Fake Steve rags on blog overlords
The best part of this interview with Dan Lyons, the Forbes editor behind Fake Steve Jobs? Where he describes how he tormented my boss, Nick Denton, by slipping in more and more British slang into The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs in an effort to throw him off the trail. Which, of course, succeeded brilliantly. To keep things balanced, Lyons also takes the piss out of Jason Calacanis. How anyone could hate the bulldog-cute entrepreneur that much is beyond me.
