Gawker: valleywag, caroline waxler

The Twitterati, Now Lazier Than Ever!

Owen Thomas — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 16:40:00 EDT

Why hit the phones when you can just do your work on Twitter? Jason Pontin, Caroline Waxler, and a Washington Post reporter show us how to tweetsource your way to more free time:

Brazen Careerist blogger Penelope Trunk thought about sex and clean boxes.

Fortune contributor Caroline Waxler, formerly an editor at Henry Blodget's Business Insider, contemplated downward mobility.

Wired's Danny Dumas saved a Washington Post reporter the trouble of finding an actual source.

Freelance editor Todd Lappin crowdsourced his geek inquiries.

Technology Review editor Jason Pontin tried to fill up a lonely letters page.

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

The Twitterati Watch Bono Wave, Wearing a Snuggie

Owen Thomas — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:03:35 EST

What, precisely, about Twitter leads people to admit to things like buying a Snuggie or mooching off a multinational media conglomerate? Here's what Caroline Waxler, Sarah Lacy, and others said in the 140-character confessional:

Twitter-loving food writer turned dubiously qualified Web entrepreneur Amanda Hesser dished out advice to Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby.
New York media scenestress Caroline Waxler bought something as seen on TV, and CNET reporter Caroline McCarthy bullied us into informing you.
Multimedia tech opinionator Sarah Lacy just couldn't leave the studio.
Gossip blogger Perez Hilton did, like, some reporting, kinda.
New York Times Detroit reporter Micki Maynard found a lone supporter of the domestic auto industry.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Henry Blodget taps Forbes survivor to edit tabloid business-news site

Owen Thomas — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:00:00 EDT

Does Henry Blodget, the disgraced former Wall Street stock analyst, have a Forbes fetish? We ask because his latest hire, Caroline Waxler, has the business fortnightly on her resume — as does soon-to-depart Blodget employee Peter Kafka. Blodget, best known for his Silicon Alley Insider site, seems to fancy himself a business-blog mogul, running two other sites — Clusterstock and the Business Sheet. Waxler will edit the latter which, in a refreshing piece of honesty, explains, "We’re still in beta, which means we still suck."

At present, the Business Sheet's headlines read like Rupert Murdoch had reassigned the editors of the New York Post to man the Wall Street Journal's copydesk. I trust Waxler, with whom I worked at a now-forgotten business magazine, will liven things up. Most recently, she attempted to bring a dash of celebrity to an overserious TheStreet.com. And besides working at VH1 on shows like Best Week Ever, she has comedy running in her veins: Joan Rivers is her aunt. If anyone can find the funny in a market meltdown, she can.

The bubble in personal-finance websites

Owen Thomas — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 11:00:00 EDT

AOL has launched Walletpop, a personal-finance site; IAC and Dow Jones have FiLife; and TheStreet.com has MainStreet.com. All hope to attract a younger audience to personal-finance news than the conventional stock talk and online portfolios offered by the staid likes of Yahoo Finance and CNNMoney. The bets are wrong both in their timing and their premise. Stockbrokers and mortgage lenders, reliable advertisers during good times, are both ducking for cover and pulling back their budgets. Froth might have sustained these sites a couple of years ago, but not now. No matter when they launched, though, their proponents should have remembered this maxim: Financial advice, like youth itself, is wasted on the young.

Unsurprisingly, there's already signs of trouble. MainStreet has lost its launch editor, Caroline Waxler, amid a change of editorial direction. FiLife has ratcheted back its once-lofty ambitions. And WalletPop? One of a bevy of websites launched by AOL, which is desperate to find readers who are not turned off by that once-magical, now-deadly three-letter brand. With few prospects for attracting an audience or advertisers, will they not soon need financial advice of their own?

Cramer: "Cleveland Valley," not Silicon Valley, will save us

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

At a breakfast event to conclude New York's Internet Week this morning, TheStreet.com's Jim Cramer said Valley innovation is all about creating "fancy ways to deliver music and videogames." The obstreperrific stockpicker said videogame makers Take-Two and Activision are tech's two most successful companies, other than Apple and Google — and that's fine, but it's also a sign Silicon Valley won't save us from the economic woes the markets gave a hint of last week. Instead, he predicts the Rust Belt — "Cleveland Valley," Cramer calls it — will. (Cramer joins Miss South Carolina in illustrating the need for better geography education in our schools.) The region, better known as the Cuyahoga River Valley, has had to reposition itself as the home of what Cramer calls "New Tech," building such marvels as "windmills with blades the size of 747 wings." Other highlights from Cramer's characteristically energy-charged talk and photos, below.

Cramer on the economy:

There are two kinds of companies right now. Those that need oil and capital and those that don't. I'm bullish on those that don't and those that produce raw materials.

On media:

My kids don't know what Newsweek is. Newsweek should be Kaplan [the educational-testing business, owned, like Newsweek, by the Washington Post Company)].

Rupert Murdoch is going to be Sam Zell and see what the Wall Street Journal can do on the Internet. With maybe half the journalists.

(Cramer's referring to Zell's ill-time purchase of newspaper publisher Tribune.)

On politics:

There's a movie coming out this summer, Get Smart. In the old show, Control battled against the evil Chaos. Lately, it's felt like Chaos has been running things.

On Microsoft-Yahoo:

Microsoft has to buy Yahoo because Google is going to give away the OS for search queries. Icahn will force the deal. Yang and his allies only own about 9 percent of the company. The Bancroft family owned 60 percent of the Journal and that didn't stop progress.

Founders Club partiers revel in the view from the top

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

HEARST TOWER, NEW YORK — Far from the sweaty, screaming fans that attended Digg's Brooklyn meetup Wednesday night, the suits of the Alley and Valley gathered last night on the top-most floor of the Hearst Tower for another Founders Club party to celebrate each others' transcendent splendor. All night, giant screens at either end of the party played clips from Citizen Kane, the barely fictionalized biopic based on the life of Hearst Corp.'s own founder, William Randolph Hearst. There wasn't a Hearst in the crowd, but there were those who aspire to be him. Blog moguls like PaidContent's Rafat Ali, Gawker Media's Nick Denton and AlleyCorp's Henry Blodget mingled. New Gifts.com CEO Jason Rapp attended, as did Digg cofounders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's mentor, Valley bad boy Sean Parker, was rumored to be in the crowd as well. Jimmy Wales, cofounder of the world's most comprehensive list of William Randolph Heart's angry responses to Citizen Kane, attended with Andrea Weckerle on his arm. Photos below.

(Photos by NewYorkInsider and NYFoundersClub)