On the same day that he published a detailed missive about his dire predictions for the online ad market, Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton made public his decision to shut down Valleywag, the blog network's Silicon Valley gossip title. Valleywag was launched early in 2006.
Valleywag editor Owen Thomas will have his job folded into a column on the Gawker.com flagship title, a gossip blog focused primarily on the New York media industry. Denton explained in an e-mail to CNET News that Thomas will remain full-time and that the Valleywag brand (as well as Valleywag.com) will stay alive.
Presumably, this means that Thomas' posts will be syndicated to Valleywag.com even though their chief destination will now be Gawker.com.
A recession seems like a great time to be running a gossip blog about the tech business, given all the juicy photos of sad, laid-off employees and rumors of badly-behaved CEOs mismanaging their companies that inevitably fly around. But the reason for Valleywag's shutdown was Denton's notoriously doom-and-gloom vision of the future--Internet ad spending will decline a full 40 percent, he predicts--and Valleywag was one of the company's less lucrative titles.
"Valleywag's traffic isn't enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page," wrote Valleywag senior writer Paul Boutin, who will not stay full-time at Gawker Media.
It was a tough sell for advertisers, given its niche audience, and many tech companies would be hesitant to advertise on a publication dedicated to ridiculing tech companies. And then there was the fact that you just can't turn the average Valley exec or VC into a Perez Hilton-style celebrity. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk simply don't add up to Britney Spears-like followings.
Reactions in the tech community will probably be mixed. Valleywag is mean, to be sure, but it can also be hilarious, and writers Thomas and Boutin were tech-press regulars long before their Gawker gigs.
Denton's handling of Gawker has been frugal, continually consolidating resources toward the blogs that were pulling in traffic and ad dollars and not hesitating to shut down the underperformers. In April, Gawker Media sold off three of its smallest blogs, and Denton has now announced that another, Consumerist, is on the block.
Early in October, Denton orchestrated a personnel shuffling that saw 14 percent of the company's editorial staff laid off but new hires made at some of the most successful titles like gadget blog Gizmodo and feminist chronicle Jezebel.
Also on Wednesday, AllThingsD's Peter Kafka reporter that Gawker Media managing editor Noah Robischon was leaving for Fast Company.
This post was expanded at 11:51 a.m. PT on Thursday.
This post was updated at 8:46 a.m. PDT.
New York blog czar Nick Denton, founder and publisher of Gawker Media, is selling three of the new-media company's properties: Idolator, Gridskipper, and Wonkette.
In an internal e-mail obtained by CNET News.com, Denton explained the sale: "To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did."
When asked via instant message to comment on prices, Denton replied with "Nope!"
Music blog Idolator will be sold to Buzznet, the pop culture social-media site that has been snapping up content creators like Stereogum; editor Maura Johnston will stay at the helm. The deal, per Silicon Alley Insider, was reportedly completed over the weekend.
Gridskipper, an urban travel blog, will become part of Curbed, the blog network run by former Gawker Media editor Lockhart Steele (and in which Gawker Media has invested).
Of the three, the sale of Wonkette likely came as a surprise to longtime Gawker Media fans. "Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it," he wrote. "The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced (an expletive that CNET News.com cannot print) into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor (Ana Marie Cox)'s slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, D.C."
The snappy political gossip blog Wonkette, with Cox at the helm, famously outed the "Washingtonienne," an anonymous D.C. sex blogger who dished a little too much dirt about political heavy-hitters. Now it'll be run by current editor Ken Layne as part of the Blogads network, which encompasses a number of other political titles like DailyKos.
Gawker Media has had plenty of successes, like the gadget blog phenomenon Gizmodo and feminist-culture title Jezebel. Its eponymous flagship title continues to be a mildly infamous mainstay of New York media gossip.
But Denton acknowledged that economic conditions are tightening the company's belt. In the middle of 2006 "we declared we were 'hunkering down," he wrote. "We've been waiting for the Internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late."
This post was updated at 9:11 a.m. PST with comment from Nick Denton.
Facebook isn't too happy with Gawker Media founder Nick Denton over some screenshots of a member's profile that he posted on Gawker.com on Tuesday, Portfolio.com reports. The social-networking site reportedly plans to send a warning letter to the New York-based digital-media entrepreneur citing several terms-of-service violations--one more, and he's out.
Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.
On Tuesday, Denton--who took over as managing editor of Gawker.com this month after several staff departures--posted a bit of an expose on 25-year-old Emily Brill, daughter of New York publishing figure Steve Brill. Screenshots of the younger Brill's Facebook profile, featuring glamorous photos of a yachting trip to the British Virgin Islands, as well as excited "status" messages about an impending trip to the Caribbean luxury getaway of St. Barth's, were juxtaposed with an older photograph of the Brown graduate when she was significantly heavier.
It was just plain mean--meaner than the time when Slate revealed via Facebook screenshots that Rudy Giuliani's daughter was a Barack Obama fan--but that's Gawker's style, and that's what made the media gossip blog rise to fame.
Facebook, however, considers it a violation of the site's terms of use, and according to the Portfolio.com blog post, the social network is prepared to give Denton's account the axe.
Facebook's terms of use stipulate that members "may not upload or republish site content on any Internet, intranet or extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation."
It's not clear whether Denton and Brill are "friends" on the site, or if it was even Denton (rather than a source or another Gawker Media employee) who pulled the screenshots from Facebook. But both Denton and Brill are members of the New York regional network, so there is a chance that Denton would have been able to view Brill's profile even without being connected as friends.
Perhaps due to the Gawker incident, Emily Brill's Facebook profile is no longer publicly searchable. It's a pertinent lesson: without privacy controls in place, you never know who might come across your photos and personal information. Those "regional" networks are big, and they allow anyone to join; and there are, as we've seen, plenty of people on the Web who are willing to circumvent terms of service.
Facebook is notoriously protective of its user data; profiles are only visible to logged-in members who belong to common "networks" or have approved friend requests. For various reasons, accounts are likely banned all the time, but it's been only recently that we've seen some extremely high-profile Web personalities feeling the heat.
Earlier this month, blogger Robert Scoble's account was temporarily banned when he used a test script from contact management site Plaxo in an attempt to transport his Facebook contacts' information to his Plaxo account.
(Other community sites have also been known to take terms of service extremely seriously; Wikipedia banned comedian Stephen Colbert when the Comedy Central host pranked the site and crashed its servers.)
For the notoriously unapologetic Gawker Media, having just brushed off the dust from last week's Gizmodo video incident at the Consumer Electronics Show, this will probably just be a bump in the road--and the site's livelihood certainly doesn't depend on Facebook screenshots. The company emerged unscathed from an incident last year in which YouTube banned a Gawker-affiliated account because it had been uploading copyrighted content interspersed with Gawker ads.
But the Denton incident does raise legitimate questions for bloggers and journalists; the Gawker founder indeed went too far by posting semiprivate profile data from someone who was otherwise not a public figure, but can information found behind Facebook's login wall be used as legitimate source material? It's a debate waiting to ignite, but if Facebook has anything to say about it, user information will stay behind closed doors.
In an instant-message conversation on Wednesday, Denton passed the Portfolio blog post off as fueled by personal beef. The writer of the original story, Denton said, was "trying to get his retaliation in first, because we're working on a story about him."
(Yeah, everything they told you about New York media? It's pretty much true.)
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