Gawker: valleywag, ben stiller

Anchor Complains About End of Car Chase

Ryan Tate — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:47:36 EDT

A car chase failed to end on camera, making MSNBC's David Shuster sad; Ben Stiller hobnobbed merrily with Lance Armstrong; and a blogger became fascinated with Lydia Hearst's fulsome... theories in financial regulation. The Twitterati were excitable today.

MSNBC's David Shuster lamented the lack of a spectacular and public end to a high-speed car chase.

After chatting with actor Ben Stiller, cyclist Lane Armstrong confirmed to a grateful public the existence of Dodgeball 2.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis explained to TechCrunch's Mike Arrington exactly how grating Arrington is; the positively scientific observation included a citation.

Business Insider's John Carney discovered financial politics had made heiress Lydia Hearst his strange bedfellow. He didn't seem particularly annoyed.

Time's James Poniewozik spent basically all day trying to pronounce the name of Dan Abrams' blog, Mediaite.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

Viacom unleashes PR thunder on San Francisco's press corps

Owen Thomas — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Viacom's legal spat with Google has the media conglomerate cast in copyright-hating, freedom-to-upload-videos-loving Silicon Valley as a mustachio-twirling villain, out to expose YouTube viewers' usernames and IP addresses. Bwahahaha! Benighted flack Jeremy Zweig has been reduced to leaving comments on blogs in response. At last, he's getting some corporate firepower: Zweig and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman Sr. are inviting a bunch of tech journalists a screening next Monday of Tropic Thunder, the Ben Stiller action-movie parody coming to theaters next month, and YouTube probably sooner than that. We've seen the invite list, and it left us scratching our heads.

None of the invited reporters, as best we can tell, are film critics. Instead, they cover technology and business. Here's my bet: Most will show up, if only to get facetime with Viacom's CEO, who rarely makes it to northern California. But if Viacom really wanted to offer local hacks a good time, Zweig should have invited Dauman's son, Philippe Jr. For one thing, Philippe Dauman Jr. works at Google, which means he'd have an interesting perspective on the copyright dispute. And the kid knows how to party. Heck, if Junior shows up, we'll skip the movie and go wherever he leads us. We hang out with journalists far too often, and we're sure he's more fun than the lot who'll show up to the screening.

Viacom's favorite tech reporters:
Miguel Helft, New York Times
Elinor Mills, CNET
Owen Thomas, Valleywag
Jackson West, Valleywag
Scott Morrison, Dow Jones Newswires
Joe Garofoli, San Francisco Chronicle
Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times
Rob Hof, BusinessWeek
Mark Hachman, Ziff-Davis
John Paczkowski, AllThingsD
Mark Glaser, PBS
Peter Burrows, BusinessWeek
Eric Auchard, Reuters
Liz Gannes, GigaOm
Brad Stone, New York Times
Matt Richtel, New York Times
Vindu Goel, San Jose Mercury News
Eric Savitz, Barrons
Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek
Tom Claburn, CMP
George Anders, Wall Street Journal
Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercury News

Robert Downey Jr., Ben Stiller and Jack Black turn social media experts

Nicholas Carlson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:00:00 EDT

Forget searching Technorati, pitching bloggers and creating Facebook pages. Know what helps a video go viral? It's easy! Launch it on MTV and cast Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. — you know, actual Hollywood talent. Then, upload it to YouTube and just sit back and watch as bloggers hungry for content discuss your video's importance in the shifting landscape of online video, all so they can embed it. As we have, below: