from valleywag.com
Nick Denton is tearing a page out of the Jann Wenner school of editorial management: Today, he announces to the world that he has taken over the driver's seat at Silicon Valley gossip site Valleywag, relieving founding editor Nick Douglas who has been with the site since it launched last February. According to Denton's post, Gawker is looking to take Valleywag in a more hard-reporting news-gathering direction (Douglas was "plucked from college" — well, from Blogebrity — to launch Vallywag) and in the meantime the most qualified person he can find for the job is, well, himself ("This is the beat I covered at my last gig as a reporter. Okay, so I was bored running a business").
It is not entirely clear from the post whether Douglas went voluntarily, but one can read between the historical lines, particularly here where Denton freely admits that "we will look stupid for letting him go" (emphasis ours). Elsewhere, shades of a Sumner Redstone-Tom Freston dynamic may be seen, particularly in this Marketwatch interview with Bambi Francisco wherein he reflects that "It would have been nice to get the Google-YouTube deal." No kidding. There's also the dissolution of the Gawker/Yahoo syndication deal, which at least in part was attributed to Valleywag's "persecution" of Lloyd Braun. But that was back in July, and its November, so we can assume that the issue has more to do with the site, which has been overhauled in both design and, Denton hopes, focus: Valleywag has typically been on the more gossipy side, and Denton wants to bring it back to pure Silicon Valley deal talk: "More money, a little less sex." Just good ol' clean Silicon Valley fun.
Denton, who never does anything without a plan, has already changed the tone of the site by breaking some real news nuggets for his audience: John Battelle's loss of the Fark network to Maxim, and confirms the rumor that Michael Wolff is in talks with Barry Diller's InterActive Corp. for a potential new internet news project (Denton also rehashes the Wolff-Diller backstory, so we know that Valleywag won't be turning up its nose at all gossip).
Wonk reaction thus far is good: Tech blogger Mathew Ingram liked Douglas but appreciates Denton's snarky insiderism, and the Blog Herald thinks Denton is "bringing sexy back" to tech blogging, which sounds like an oxymoron if there ever was one.
