I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Get out of categories such as politics to which advertisers are averse. No more election coverage on Gawker!

Renegotiate vendor contracts. So much for the bar bill at Joey & Eddie's.

Consolidate titles. I will soon be writing Valleywag as a column for Gizmodo or Gawker, whichever will take me. Gabriel Snyder is a lovely young man. As is Jason Chen. I can't decide which one is more handsome and brilliant, really.

Offshore more. And I will be writing said column from a newly affordable Iceland.

Variable compensation. For less.

More value for marketers. With more ads on it.

I have some bad news. Here's the heart of it: we are cutting 19 of our 133 editorial positions and suspending bonus payments at the start of next year. With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites. But I know that's scant consolation for the colleagues we're losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories.

You can guess the reason for these brutal measures: the recession. Sure, the company is currently profitable and advertising sales are up by about 30% on their level of a year ago. Our biggest clients are consumer electronics and entertainment companies that are relatively well insulated. And, yes, this is not the first time I've predicted doom: in July 2006, when we "battened down the hatches" and closed down Sploid and Screenhead; and in April this year, when we spun off Idolator, Gridskipper and Wonkette.

But now the credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy. Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us.

We never used to talk about the business side of the operation. Traffic was the only concern; my belief was that juicy news would draw the readers and the advertising would take care of itself. We were patient; even if it took four years for a site to develop the audience that finally registered with advertisers, we had the time. No longer.

Sites such as Consumerist, whose success has been measured more in traffic and recognition than in revenue, now need to cover their costs. I can't underline enough that this harsh commercial judgment is no reflection whatsoever on the editorial teams that are being cut.

Each of these sites performs a vital function. Consumerist provides an outlet for disgruntled consumers that exists nowhere else on the web; Valleywag has given puffed-up Silicon Valley the prick it's long needed; and Fleshbot manages to be classy and filthy at the same time. The site leads and writers on all of our sites have done exactly what we asked them to: work harder than the competition and grow the audience. It's my commercial judgment that's been at fault.

One reason we're eliminating these positions is to reinforce the teams on the sites with the most commercial appeal—Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker and Gawker—and the properties such as Jezebel, io9, Deadspin and Jalopnik which are poised to join them.

One new recruit we're confirming today is Gabriel Snyder from W Magazine in Los Angeles who, as managing editor of Gawker.com, will continue the site's evolution into a national news and entertainment site. We are also hiring new contributors at Jezebel, Deadspin, Kotaku and io9.

Even in the growing editorial teams we need to control costs. And that means a new look at traffic bonuses. We've been spending $50,000 a month on average on pageview bonuses. The scheme has made writers hustle for traffic even in teams so large that there was a risk they become lumbering. It's helped us hit a record 274m pageviews last month, up 69% on last September.

Pageview bonuses will continue this quarter. And we are committed to pageview incentives, and to measuring performance by a writer's individual pageviews, in the long term. But a first quarter spike in traffic — and the resulting bonus payments — could be dangerous if advertising markets are troubled next year. And we're assuming that the economy is so volatile that most of you would like a little bit more predictability about your own income.

That's why we're suspending the pageview bonus for the first quarter at least, but making up for some of the loss of income by raising pay. If you haven't recently agreed to a new rate, your monthly base amount will automatically be increased by 5% in January.

The news about the job and bonus cuts will be demoralizing. The golden age of the blog is over, people will say. Gawker Media is behaving like those big media companies that we mock so easily. I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs; or how much more unpleasant life will be at the many internet ventures and newspapers that won't make it through the downturn. I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn.

But there is no escaping the fact that we're losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break — starting with this email, which you are free to leak.

Block has since confessed to the stunt. In a post on Lam's hire, Block says "Brian Lam and I are actually pals outside of work — have been for years." But back in 2006, a tipster told Valleywag, Block created a blog called Boycott Gizmodo! and a Digg account with the same name that he used to promote blog's one and only post to Digg's front page. "The time has come to Boycott Gizmodo," reads the post. "Not only did Brian Lam and Gizmodo purposefully deceive long standing readers such as myself about the iPhone, they did a terrible job of covering their tracks." (Lam's post promised readers news about an "iPhone" device on a Friday, before the launch of the actual device — and then, on a Monday, revealed that Cisco owned a trademark on the term, long attached to speculation about an Apple cell phone, and had released an iPhone-branded product. The companies long since settled the matter, giving Apple rights to the iPhone name)

We asked Block if he was the author of the blog. In response, Block told us, "Brian and I have always been friends who knew where to draw the line." Block also just published a confessional blog post titled "Bygones and rivalries," in which he confessed to authoring the "Boycott Gizmodo!" blog. He also offered another anecdote from a rivalry we're all going to miss.

Of course, it went both ways, too. Gizmodo and a lot of other sites were pulling shenanigans day in and out, with the traded barbs pushing everyone harder, thinning out mistakes which could turn into ammunition. The result being better, faster, more accurate gadget sites, of course, but it’s a little funny, because that stuff all seemed so very serious then. Looking at it now, the storied rivalry retired, it’s almost kind of cute.

There was a line to be drawn, too, and to me that line was where real damage could be done. This May, in fact, that line drew itself right in my inbox when a disgruntled former Gizmodo editor pinged me offering a tidy bounty. The full “back catalog of classified Gizmodo emails, some discussing Engadget,” as well as “access to Gizmodo’s tips account [that'd be where you could get all of Gizmodo's scoops, or even turn over their tipsters to the companies they're leaking about]” and the “master list of Gizmodo online sources, which is a great aid.” Without hesitation, I turned this person (and any data they could make use of) over to Brian and owner of Gizmodo/Gawker Media, Nick Denton, for them to deal with as they saw fit.

Can we just say it? Julia has the buzz and attention these second-tier bloggers and video makers have dreamt of for years, and they can't stand it. Maybe you guys need to wipe off that mirror on your laps and take a good hard look. Over here, we're nothing but grateful for her success — Wired's Allison story, sure to be read by hundreds of thousands of our kind of people, namechecks Valleywag five times. (Photo by Brian Solis)

In a word, yes. I instant-messaged Denton — that's the only way he communicates, really — asking him to elaborate, and he replied: "Oh, just because he's got such a nauseatingly successful track record."

A British-born Financial Times beat reporter sent to cover Silicon Valley during the dotcom boom, Denton reinvented himself as a technology entrepreneur. He sold a dotcom events business, First Tuesday, in a luckily timed deal as the bubble was bursting. He briefly entangled himself in an online newsfeeds venture called iSyndicate before starting a direct competitor, Moreover (that's "more OH ver," you Yanks.) But he quit as CEO years before VeriSign bought the company. He's the first to admit that his success is more from good timing than hard work.

Denton's clearly wealthy. He owns a fancy loft in New York's SoHo neighborhood. He funded Gawker Media, as best I can tell, out of his own pocket. At the same time, he invested in other blog ventures like Treehugger and Curbed. But he's far, far short of Thiel's $500 million a year. In 2004, when he first courted me as a blogger, I asked him where he made his fortune. He gave me a vague answer about currency trading and investing in London real estate. Denton is familiar with the business of manipulating markets. He cowrote All That Glitters, a book on on the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank caused by one young trader.

Having observed Denton for years, I have to say this: He's never seemed happer than when working as an editor. I was almost sorry to replace him as Valleywag's editor a year ago, because he so clearly enjoyed the role. When he appointed himself editor of Gawker in January, it seemed more a homecoming than a temp gig.

That's why I found Denton's note so mysterious. Could he be unhappy as the blogosphere's success story? Does he wish he'd instead joined the lucrative hedge-fund world?

I'll admit I barely know the man. In an age of oversharing, Denton makes an art of revealing no personal details. That's what makes those four words stand out: "Thiel makes me sick!" I almost wish I hadn't asked him to explain himself.

(Photo of Thiel by David Orban; Denton by Matt Haughey)

Six Apart's offices seem pretty ordinary to me. Their meeting space is *tiny*. Googleplex's niceties are all about enticing their workers to stay at work longer — yeah, that's real HAWT!. Valleywag offices look like a dump to me.

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Nick Denton Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 7:26 AM

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group. * GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder. * WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former founder of one of the web's very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites, which includes Daily Kos, among others.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. We need to concentrate our energies, and the time of Chris Batty's sales group, on the sites with the greatest potential for audience and advertising.

The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone. I'm 917-XXX-XXXX and Noah is on 917-XXX-XXXX.

Regards

Nick

————————————————————————————————————————

GAWKER MEDIA KEY FACTS
* A dozen sites, Gizmodo first launched in August 2002, most recent,
io9, in January 2008
* Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Defamer,
Jezebel, Valleywag, io9, Consumerist, Fleshbot
* A record 18 "Bloggie" nominations in 2008, way more than any other
blog collective (one of those was for Idolator)
* Audience of 29.7m unique visitors a month for the whole network, up
82% at annualized rate (http://www.quantcast.com/p-d4P3FpSypJrlA)
* Each individual site has at least 1m uniques or, in the case of io9, soon will
* Pageviews of 227m in March — 219m if you take out the three sites
being spun out — up 89% on a year earlier (Sitemeter)
* For those who measure these things, Gawker is the web's leading
independent blog group

From: Jason Calacanis

put some math your 9k blog post..... if you're going to bust my chops about something please don't let it be revenue, because i got that on lockdown for a decade.

http://valleywag.com/376042/tipster-mahalo-revenues-are-around-9000-a-month

respek!

best j

ps - Denton is probably losing 2-3k a month on you guys so don't be surprised if he pulls the plug if you can't get to 10m pages. unless of course Valleywag is his own personal way of breaking chops in the valley, which i think it is. then you guys got a gig for a long time.

the biggest part of Denton's scam... i mean business model... is that 90% of traffic to Gawker sites is to the homepage or RSS feeds where you guys get nothing.

so, you can basically take the $7.50 rate and assume 10-20% of that is your actual cut of the posts value.

that being said, it's the best pay in the business... prob. on par with or better than Weblogs, Inc. depending on the blog/person.

Denton was plotting the pay system for two years... it's really amazing that it's come to pass. It's inspiring to see someone cut the business down to it's core and i'm loving watching the results. Some brands will be destory by folks like Jordan who know how to game pageviews, others will boom and make denton sick margins and tens of millions when he sells the brands out from under you guys.

best j

The rate that my employer, Gawker Media, pays its contract writers was adjusted tonight at midnight. A "modest reduction." We'll find out the new pay plan by the end of the week. Writers are expected to continue working. No matter how much traffic their posts generate, writers will receive at least their base. On top of that, productive writers can receive a "Pageview Bonus," which varies depending on which site they write for. If I were a salesperson, I'd expect to know my quarterly sales goals well in advance.

• 1. InfoWorld claims Microsoft bought Yahoo. The respected tech trade's article is so straight-faced and credible that other journos weigh in seriously on the deal.
• 2. CollegeHumor.com serves up a single parody MySpace page. Way to take a vacation today, lusers.
• 3. CNET publishes the Urlrurl hoax we refused to run, plus a hoax about Intellipedia wars. What else should we not believe on CNET today?
• 4. Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton announces the sale of neo-feminist site Jezebel to Conde Nast, and Jezebel introduces new rich-brat editors from the midtown Manhattan world its readers loathe. Can't you just feel Big Nick's love for his female readers?
• 5. Larry Brin and Sergey Page call for 30-second YouTube auditions from people who want to settle the planet Mars as part of a Google/Virgin project. Instead of producing slick hoax videos, why don't you guys go build some real rockets?

Gawker writers are each assigned a "Monthly Base" pay. No matter how much traffic their posts generate in a month, writers will receive at least their base. On top of that, productive writers can receive a "Pageview Bonus," which varies depending on which site they write for. All Gawker sites are assigned a "pageview rate". Any amount of traffic a writer generates over their minimum is paid as "bonus." By comparing their monthly base to the pageview rate of their site, a writer can determine how many pageviews they need to generate per month or, if they exceed their minimum, how much they're getting paid in total. A leaked memo explains the whole process in great detail.

For example, my monthly minimum pay rate works out to 256,000 page views a month. If I deliver under that, I'm (theoretically) reprimanded and encouraged to write more popular posts. To determine my pay for a particular day or month, I multiply my total page view count by Valleywag's pay rate. Our contract is pretty standard fare for performance-based pay, offering a "monthly base" and a "page view bonus." However, Valleywag's writers have soundly beaten their minimum post counts all three months we've had this program in effect. Our page view rate is our de facto pay rate.

Since this plan was announced in late December, we've known that the pay rate is to be changed on the first day of every quarter. I expected to be informed of the pay rate before the month started, but that hasn't happened, even after repeated requests to my superiors. We're working in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop, effectively being paid based on how many views we can drum up — and now the goalposts are being moved mid-kick. This is unnerving and a slap in the face to the "creative underclass" that writes for Gawker's blogs.

If a potential advertiser asked Gawker to start running its ads and promised to negotiate terms later, they'd be laughed out of the room — but that is exactly what the company is asking of its writers. If I were a salesperson, I'd expect to know my quarterly sales goals well in advance.

Gawker Media is, let's not forget, a for-profit business. The company might need time to make proper pricing decisions. But that goes both ways: Writers are for-profit as well and we should not be expected to work blind.

And, no, this is not an April Fools' joke.

(Photo by Hey Paul)

Gawker pays $7.50 per thousand pageviews, editor Nick Denton announced recently. Shnayerson's target was 670,000 pageviews. Under Gawker's scheme, which pays a guaranteed rate to bloggers, and a bonus for the pageviews they generate above their target. That means Shnayerson was getting paid $5,000 a month, at minimum. Not bad for a blogger. (Gawker, like Valleywag, is published by Gawker Media, and I report to a guy who reports to Denton. If you want to know our pay rate, just ask.)

Our admittedly biased answer: Duh. We're not alone in this opinion. Leitch wrote his piece for GQ and it ran in an issue that's been out for weeks. He then quoted from it for the Valleywag post. Since when must a reporter ask nicely before writing a piece on someone? According to Cuban fanboys, noted journalism experts all, since forever. Some even believe that Cuban and GQ signed a contract before the magazine could proceed with an article. Anybody up for some mindless outrage?

We're sure that he doesn't care about ethics, only blog hits and garnering attention for increased book sales. — Miguel

Totally not ethical. He basically lied to you and then used your interview for his own personal gain. I'd be more than upset with him and hopefully, the magazine is as well. That was very unprofessional in my opinion. His work for the magazine should be kept separate from his blogging life. — tiffany

Completely unethical, possibly illegal. The magazine that paid for his travel and wage, likely owns all of the intellectual property generated. When the author took that property and used it for his own benefit outside of the company on blog, he may have violated the law. Even if he did not break the law, it was unethical, and bad journalism. These are new issues that have to be tested and figured out though... — PRoales