Valleywag

» see valleywag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

valleywag was a coastal-american story i mostly watched from a distance. in 2006 i was in turkey finishing engineering school. the silicon valley personnel beat was not a thing i had access to or context for. i would see individual valleywag posts when hacker news or slashdot picked one up, mostly the larry-page-dated-marissa-mayer kind, but the day-to-day grind of who-just-quit-stumbleupon coverage was for a specific tech-insider audience that lived on us coasts and breathed the air valleywag was making fun of.

the site launched in february 2006 under gawker media. nick douglas was the first editor. his opening post broke the news that google's larry page had previously dated marissa mayer, which was the kind of personal-life story valleywag would spend its entire run prosecuting. douglas was fired in november 2006. owen thomas took over in july 2007 and ran it through its busiest period before handing it to ryan tate in may 2009. by 2012 valleywag was running thinner. gawker folded the brand into the main gawker.com domain in late 2012, then revived valleywag as a tab on gawker.com under sam biddle in april 2013.

biddle's run was the one a lot of people remember. it was less industry-insider gossip and more aggressive techlash coverage of specific founders and the failed funding rounds behind them. it also coincided with rising legal exposure across gawker media. in late 2015 nick denton announced a pivot of gawker.com to politics coverage and quietly retired the valleywag brand. seven months later peter thiel's funding of the hulk hogan invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against gawker led to a 140-million-dollar judgment. gawker media filed for bankruptcy in june 2016 and was sold for parts. univision bought the remaining sites but did not relaunch valleywag.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

valleywag's value proposition was that nobody else was covering tech the way it covered tech. trade press in 2006 was largely product-launch coverage written by ex-marketers, written for engineers who wanted to know what their employer's competitor had just shipped. valleywag covered the people. it wrote about who got drunk at the south park social and whose marriage was failing. it wrote about who paul graham was actually betting on inside y combinator before any other outlet did. some of that was real journalism with a gossipy edge. some of it was actual gossip dressed up as journalism. the line between the two was not always clear, and that ambiguity was the brand.

~ the fall ~

the founders did not love it. some of them filed lawsuits. some of them threatened lawsuits and got retractions. paul graham's 2008 hacker news ban on valleywag links was an early signal that the industry valleywag covered had organized against it. the deeper structural problem was that valleywag's editors kept publishing material about non-public-figure employees, like a 2009 story (since retracted) blaming a drunk rackspace technician for a data-center outage, and then having to walk it back. by the time the gawker bankruptcy hit in 2016, the legal exposure that took the company down was not from a valleywag post specifically, but valleywag had set the tone that made that exposure inevitable.

~ the legacy ~

tech gossip never really left, it just moved off-platform. the function valleywag served is now distributed across substack newsletters like eric newcomer's, plus the information's subscription-only personnel beat and a handful of anonymous workplace apps that nobody calls journalism. nothing has the same single-brand recognition that valleywag had at peak. the cluster of writers who passed through valleywag mostly went on to legitimate tech reporting jobs. sam biddle is at the intercept. owen thomas was at the sf chronicle. the brand itself never got rebuilt. nick denton's larger thesis that there was a market for a daily tech-gossip beat is still arguably correct. that the market would support running it the way valleywag ran it is the part that did not survive 2016.

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