Gawker
Calley Nye is a fresh-faced young woman from Southern California who founded her own flack shack, Exonerated PR, to leverage a preternatural ability to sign up for every social network under the sun with the handle "Silicon Calley." In the Seesmic video above, the 22-year-old squeals with a friend, "We love you Michael Arrington," shortly before Arrington posted a shout-out for an unnamed PR person. Could Nye be the rep referred to? Arrington certainly liked her enough to hire her.
Shortly after discontinuing her own blog, Nye's byline appeared on TechCrunch, where she's become a regular contributor.
But her latest article on startup SavvyAuntie got pulled from the site shortly after being published. Despite the yanking, it still went out over the RSS wire and into a syndicated spot on the Washington Post's Web site. Could Arrington have reconsidered the wisdom of giving a professional startup rep space on the masthead?
Maybe Nye has taken off her publicity hat and decided on another career change — before marketing bands and startups with social media, she also bared all in work as a model. We can't help but admire the youngster's chutzpah, but Arrington should know that ostensible journalists laying down with their public relations enemies has traditionally been considered an ethical taboo. Next thing you know, the site might feature articles about companies written by people who've invested in them.
