Gawker: valleywag, kevin delaney

Want to write about Google for the Wall Street Journal? The job's open

Owen Thomas — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 20:40:00 EDT

Kevin Delaney, the Wall Street Journal's Google and Yahoo beat reporter, is decamping from the Valley to New York to take a deputy editor gig at WSJ.com, we hear. A perk of the job: Getting to disclose Google's business relationships with Journal parent company News Corp. in every story.

WSJ reporters tweak new boss

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:45:26 EDT

The way News Corp. monarch Rupert Murdoch manipulates his many newspapers is enough to make Charles Foster Kane blush. It's one reason integrity-laden Wall Street Journal reporters lobbied against his takeover bid. But now it seems the mockingly self-righteous crew is starting to revel in their deal with the Aussie devil.

In a typically overdetailed, needlessly insightful examination of Google's troubles with its social network Orkut, in Brazil — which we didn't actually read, due to its gleefully excessive length — the Journal's Antonio Regalado and Kevin Delaney had fun with a disclaimer:

News Corp. has agreed to acquire Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. In addition, News Corp. and Google have an agreement for Google to sell ads that appear on MySpace and share the ad revenue.

The disclaimer struck us a bit of a stretch. And now, a tipster tells us Regalado stuck it in as a prank — a prank that sailed its way past the copydesk. Says a New York media source:

He joked that the disclaimer graph about News Corp, Google and Dow Jones is a funny/sad sign of the times. He said he suggested it just to be annoying.

Antonio, when Murdoch puts you on the street, my boss wants you to look him up. But only if you can cut those Orkut stories down to 200 words.

The Valley's most dreaded job, YouTube watcher

Mary Jane Irwin — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:05:10 EDT

YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, look what you've wrought. The YouTube founders launched their video site thinking eBay sellers would use it to spice up auctions, or geeks would use it to improve their dating chances. They surely never thought that their video site, now owned by Google, would spawn Silicon Valley's newest entry-level job: YouTube watcher. The gig is just as depressing as it sounds.

Big media companies like Viacom, constrained by the limits of copyright law and Google's recalcitrance, are forced to pay companies like Los Gatos-based BayTSP, which specializes in snooping file sharers and protecting copyrights, to slog through YouTube's bloated index searching for infringements. That makes for a solid eight-hour day for BayTSP's "video analysts." Contracts prevent employees from discussing their tedium with friends and family, but they were allowed to open up to a Wall Street Journal reporter in the clip above.

And after all the eyestrain, when enough videos have been flagged — like the 100,000 clips cited in Viacom's Google lawsuit — what reward do employees get? New office furniture. Hooray! Indeed, the job is so ennui-inducing that WSJ reporter Kevin Delaney can't even bring himself to emote once during his office tour.