Thursday, November 13, 2008
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I'll Admit It, I Liked Valleywag Now that my linkblog is all exposed for the world to see here, it'd be pretty hard to deny that I'm a daily reader of Valleywag. I'll admit it. I enjoyed pretty much everything about it. Schadenfreude, voyeurism, whatever. I was disappointed with the staff cuts and I'm not pleased with Boutin getting the boot.
Mostly what I hate about this is when I see posts like this one from CNET:
Valleywag is dead (or, at least, diminished), as CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. About time. I used to like Valleywag, but then it started trying to drive page views by breaking "news" about the sex trade in Silicon Valley, trying to foment controversy around Peter Thiel's personal life, and so on.
When it broke news, even scandalous news, it was good. When it didn't, well, it wasn't.
Contrast that with TechCrunch. TechCrunch routinely breaks real news. It covers startups that matter (and many that don't). It has become an hourly read for me, as it offers content that I don't easily find elsewhere.
Is it unique in this? No. CNET breaks a lot of technology news and has done some interesting work with blogs (pats himself on the back), plus it remains a must-visit product reviews site. Nobody does general business news better than The Wall Street Journal. The Register? It provides a great deal of exceptional content with a fantastic, biting tone.
Valleywag? Increasing snide, decreasing substance. Owen Thomas did much better work while he was at Business 2.0. I like his writing. I just think he had to pander to the wrong elements at Valleywag. Hopefully we'll get the best of Valleywag (and Thomas) as it's folded into Gawker.
It was written by Matt Asay, who I don't think I've ever read before, and based off this post I don't think I'll ever bother to read again. The whole thing revolves around undocumented allegation, and then is followed up by several "you betcha!" commentors below.
My usual reading habits had me read Valleywag as a sort of reward for getting things done during the day, but more recently, I've found that the blog had increased in value for me, with Nicholas Carlson and Owen Thomas doing long editorials talking about recession woes and media commentary.
The fact that Matt hasn't seen these shows that he's shooting from the hip, hasn't read Valleywag in a while, and isn't qualified to write what he wrote.
Regarding the thing that is happening, and that is VWag staff getting cut yet again and merged into Gawker, I'll repeat what I said during Denton's first round of cuts:
“This is an opportunity. There will be tightwads and there will be bold faithfuls. This next turn in our economy will show which business philosophies actually work. I'm not just saying this because I'll miss their writing, but Denton is making a mistake here. You double down on your sales efforts, not reduce the inventory quantity and quality to sell against. Gawker Media is insignificant when it comes to the size of all media sales. There's plenty of other smaller organizations and sliding bigger organizations for them to take the slack of.”
But then, I'm not Denton. Heck, I'm not even in charge of sales at Mashable.
Given the relative insignificance of any blog (let alone the major brand names of the tech space) in the grand scheme of all media, without a doubt I'd know in my mind that there's enough cash to sustain my business, and that the trick would be to approach sales in a way that would somehow make that happen.
Or, as I said recently in a related conversation in the comments at Mashable: "Selling is hard right now," should be words I never here from my sales guy.
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