The rate that my employer, Gawker Media, pays its contract writers was adjusted tonight at midnight. The staff of this site has not been told the details of the new pay rate, but we do know that everyone at Valleywag is getting a per-view pay decrease. Senior management is promising the hit is only a "modest…
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…
Even though no one should ever buy a blog, David Hauslaib is selling Jossip and his three other blogs, says the New York Post. There's a rumor Condé Nast thought about buying, though a source from the publisher's parent company says hell no. And of course Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, it just poaches their editors.
For the liberal-arts majors who still dominate the ranks of reporters, simple multiplication is a daunting task. Which is likely why Radar and Silicon Alley Insider have contributed 419 words about the firing of Gawker reporter Maggie Shnayerson, yet failed to answer the essential question: How much was she making?…
Mark Cuban was happy to sit with Deadspin blogger Will Leitch for an interview to go into GQ. (Deadspin, a sports blog, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher.) But then Cuban saw Leitch's subsequent post on Valleywag. "While I respect the magazine," Cuban writes on his blog, "I am not a fan of the site…
Because you're nosy about it, here's graphical proof that on the Internet, Apple is a much bigger topic than anything else we post about. Yet the video of Gizmodo's cruel CES prank drew 10 times more clicks than our biggest MacBook Air post. Hollywood still crushes all. On Gawker, Nick Denton's mirror post of Tom…
Richard Blakeley, the Gawker Media cameraman whose antics for Gizmodo drew widespread attention, is selling his press badge — the last one he'll ever get, he says — for $100 on Craigslist. Why is it a collector's item? Because CES has banned him from attending future events after he filmed himself using a remote…
Star Wonkette commenter FlakJack listed additional punishments the Consumer Electronics Show people should mete out to Gizmodo's TV-remote prankster. Edited version:
Richard Blakeley, the scamp behind Gizmodo's TV-turnoff stunt at CES, has been banned from attending the show. Here's the CEA's official response to the Gizmodo TV-B-Gone prank:
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.
Fleshbot, a NSFW site published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media, feels left out. Digg's terms of service do not allow pornographic content, so Fleshbot doesn't benefit from the flood of traffic prominent placement on Digg allows. Boo frickin' hoo, I say.
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.
I'll admit it, I'm jealous: While Valleywag remains stuck with a logo that looks like an IBM monitor from 1982, io9, Gawker Media's newly launched sci-fi site, has gotten a wickedly cool illustration. The future is coming, and it is diabetically adorable. I quizzed site editor Annalee Newitz on the origins of the…
Valleywag dwells on sex, greed, and hypocrisy. That leaves little room for the merely quirky, edgy, and unprofitable. For that, we present to you io9, a new sci-fi blog published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media. All of our colleagues are dutifully saying nice things. There will be none of that from Valleywag, thank…
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…
Valleywag is of course known for its dead-on accuracy, so our predictions for 2008 need no introduction. Inside, my 25 predictions (made without inside information) cover the futures of Facebook, Google, Digg, YouTube, Twitter, the Wall Street Journal, Apple, Yahoo, Gawker Media, AOL, Dell, LOLcats, the president,…
This just in from Forbes: Apparently Gawker Media, the publisher of Valleywag, Gawker, Gizmodo, and other fine blogs, has changed its name to "Denton Media." Except not. But you know what I really find annoying? This article was written by someone I personally taught how to factcheck. [Forbes]
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.
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,…
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…
