Forty years before Valleywag, a middle-aged man named Clay Felker took over a newspaper supplement and turned it into New York magazine, deliberately breaking the rules in order to bring back readers who were abandoning reading to watch more TV. Felker died Tuesday at age 82. The New York Times obituary — I'm sure…
"Jim McKay, the venerable and eloquent sportscaster thrust into the role of telling Americans about the tragedy at the 1972 Munich Olympics, has died. He was 87. McKay died Saturday of natural causes at his farm in Monkton, Md. The broadcaster who considered horse racing his favorite sport died only hours before Big…
The man whose parents' battle to save him from a nerve disease was depicted in the movie 'Lorenzo's Oil' died Friday at his home in Virginia, having lived more than 20 years longer than doctors had predicted. Lorenzo Odone, who doctors had predicted would die in childhood, died one day after his 30th birthday, said…
"Dick Martin, a veteran nightclub comic who with his partner, Dan Rowan, turned a midseason replacement slot at NBC in 1968 into a hit that redefined what could be done on television, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, Calif., according to The Associated Press. He was 86. …
"Will Elder, whose frantic, gag-filled illustrations helped to define the comic identity of Mad magazine and who was a creator of the Playboy cartoon serial "Little Annie Fanny," died Wednesday in Rockleigh, N.J. He was 86.The cause was Parkinson's disease, said Gary VandenBergh, his son-in-law. A dead-on caricaturist…
Well, you can have his gun now. Oscar winning actor, NRA president, and all around iconic conservative slab of beefcake, Charlton Heston, died last night at his Beverly Hills home. He was 84. "His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Bill Powers, who declined to discuss the cause. In August 2002, Mr.…
Best Buy's Geek Squad is holding a memorial tonight to honor Arthur C. Clarke. Alas. Everyone was far too polite to say this about the recently deceased sci-fi writer: Had he lived in the U.S. rather than Sri Lanka, he'd be a prime membership candidate for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. "Once they have…
Russell Shaw, the HuffPo contributor and former ZDNet and Weblogs, Inc blogger who good-naturedly took guff from us Engadget brats when I last saw him at CES 2006, "passed away while on a reporting trip in San Jose, traveling from his home base of Portland, Oregon" according to CNET editor in chief Dan Farber. A bit…
Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor whose work, the Wall Street Journal eulogizes, "led him to preach the evils of computers," passed away March 5 in his native Germany. Word just hit the news wires last night. The Journal's bio includes this quote: "The Internet is like one of those garbage dumps outside of Bombay.…
Attached to the hilarious — if technically inaccurate — chart I blogged yesterday is an appreciation for D&D creator Gary Gygax, who died last week, penned by Wired editor Adam Rogers. "Gygax's genius was to give players a way to inhabit the characters inside their games, rather than to merely command faceless…
The late Ric Weiland, employee no. 5 at Microsoft, left a $65 million fortune to the Pride Foundation of Seattle, a gay and lesbian nonprofit. Weiland committed suicide in 2006 at the age of 53. He's said to have struggled with depression. But depression is a medical diagnosis, not the explanation for a life. One…
Tom Lantos, a longtime Congressman for the Valley, has died. He had suffered from esophageal cancer. Unlikely to shed a tear: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who was called a "moral pygmy" by Lantos after Yahoo outed a Chinese dissident to the authorities. [Huffington Post]
What is online video worth in the age of YouTube? $1,200, according to the Writers' Guild of America. That's the amount the group of television and movie writers agreed to accept for work streamed over the Internet. An odd amount, and like all fixed pay for the hit-and-miss, easily measured world of the Web, almost…
Jeanette Symons, a cofounder of several telecommunications startups and hero to girl geeks, is believed dead in a plane crash in Maine. Symons was flying her own Cessna Citation. Her most recent venture, Industrious Kid, runs Imbee.com, a social network for children. Her death proves a sad truth: Women aviators are …
Michael Klein, the former CEO of eGroups, died in a plane crash in Panama on Christmas Eve, along with his daughter, Talia, 13. Klein had sold eGroups to Yahoo for $450 million in 2000; before that, he'd sold another company, Transoft Networks, to Hewlett-Packard. [San Jose Mercury News]
Did Business 2.0 die a natural death? Or was it murdered? The story told so far about the tech-focused, San Francisco-based magazine's demise was an abrupt drop in advertising. But in his MediaShift column, Mark Glaser suggests that a poorly planned business-side reorganization by its parent company, Time Inc., is…
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's rumor that Netscape would be killed off has proven off the mark. Not because several Netscapers have surfaced to deny the rumors, but because you can't kill something that's already dead. There may be a community that, out of laziness or inertia, still visits its grave daily.…
Oakland Post editor and longtime Bay Area journalist Chauncey Bailey killed by masked gunman. [NBC 11]
Blogger, filmmaker, and creator of girl-centric video games Theresa Duncan reported dead. [LA Observed via Mediabistro]
Teenage entrepreneur Ben Casnocha experiences the death of a former classmate. Not someone he really knew, mind you, but close enough to provide conveniently timed talking points for his upcoming "intellectual salon" on death. [ben.casnocha.com]
