Blogging Silicon Valley

Bambi Francisco writes that Gawker founder, Nick Denton, will temporarily take over reporting duties at ValleyWag, his Silicon Valley gossip site. He said that he wants to bring in more business gossip instead of just personal gossip.

He tells me that he has a juicy scoop about John Battelle’s Federated Media advertising network losing a major client. The loss is a “slap in the face” to Battelle, says Denton, who self-funded Gawker Media, which was launched in 2002.
Denton hopes to triple the traffic at ValleyWag, which he said was getting an average of 20,000 or so daily pageviews. He doesn’t plan on changing the tone too much, just mixing in financial news gossip with tabloid gossip. “We’ll still publish the scoop on Larry Page’s inhouse dating, or Eric Schmidt’s long-time adultery,” he said, via AOL’s IM. I asked Denton why publishing lies about Schmidt added any value or was worth reporting on. His response: “What lies about Schmidt?” he askded. “There are a host of open secrets in Silicon Valley — which all the insiders know, and gossip about. Valleywag’s role is to reflect that conversation, and open it up to the wider world.”

Battelle responds:

If Nick truly intends to step it up over at Valleywag by improving its financial and business reporting, I am sure he will exercise a long held journalistic skill: understanding the business model of the subjects he’s writing about before presuming to judge them, and contacting us for comment before publishing rumor or speculation.

Oooh burn.

Posted by on November 13th, 2006 at 11:13 am


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