Gawker: valleywag, san jose mercury news

Yahoo launches APT ad-buying tool, confuses agency friends

Nicholas Carlson — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Yahoo's marketing department didn't like "Apex," and their choice, AMP, was already taken, so when Yahoo finally announced its new display advertising dashboard for sales representatives yesterday, the company decided to call it APT. The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News have already signed up, reports the Wall Street Journal. Yahoo's friends at ad agencies Publicis, WPP and Havas plan to hold off on using it, though.

Mostly because each has already announced plans to develop dashboards of their own — in partnership with Yahoo — and they're confused about the new tool. "For us, we've already got something going with Yahoo, and I'm not sure this changes that strategy," one agency exec told the WSJ. "The news is more a continued statement along the line that digital media is really hard to buy. We need to make it easier."

San Jose Mercury News inadvertently offers most accurate analysis yet of Microsoft-Yahoo deal

Owen Thomas — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Wondering what a Microsoft takeover will mean for the Yahoos? Front-page editors at the San Jose Mercury News offer what one hopes will be the last word.

Mercury News editor leaves troubled newspaper for slightly less troubled one

Jackson West — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:40:53 EDT

San Jose Mercury News business and technology reporter Vindu Goel is returning to the New York Times, where he once interned as a young cub reporter, to be the new deputy technology editor. The Michigan and Harvard alum likes fine wine and long walks in the woods. The Times is hoping to boost its technology coverage, while the Merc loses yet another veteran from a once-esteemed tech-reporting staff.

Goel's Facebook buddy and comrade on the tech desk Dean Takahashi signed with VentureBeat just last month. VentureBeat is run by, you guessed it, another former Merc techie, Matt Marshall. Goel should be happy he's getting out while the getting is good: MediaNews Group, the Denver newspaper group which bought the Merc last year, is dumping editorial staff at all its papers through layoffs and buyouts.

Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech reporter at...

Owen Thomas — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:25:22 EST

Dean Takahashi, a veteran tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, has quit the newspaper to join VentureBeat. [GameSpot]

Beatbloggers to blog beats for bloggity blogosphere

Paul Boutin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:22:09 EST

Beatblogging.org is a new site about hybrid forms of collaborative information gathering backed by thirteen credible news publications including Wired.com and the San Jose Mercury News. The premise:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a "live" social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better. See what happens when 13 pro reporters with real beats give that idea a go ... blah blah blah pro-am journalism, distributed reporting, collaborative information gathering, blog-style reportage.

The smart money is to publicly praise the pro-am journalists, but hedge your career bets on the pro-pros. At the rate New York Times contributors are taking over Facebook, this latest hybrid journalism is going to be known as just journalism by March.

Fire in downtown Palo Alto

wagger1 — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 01:50:50 EDT

The 300 block of University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is aflame, according to Megan McCarthy, who's on the scene. "Flames are shooting 20 to 30 feet into the air from the rear of the building," reports Palo Alto Online. Threatened by the blaze: The Peninsula bureau of the San Jose Mercury News. A block away: Accel Partners, the VC firm which funded Facebook and BitTorrent, among others. Anyone know of other businesses that might be affected? Leave a comment, and Megan will update us if there's more news.

Good night, and good luck with that vlog

Paul Boutin — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 12:06:14 EST

The Merc buries the lede in its front page poll about the Net. Given the choice between clicking an online "citizen video" of a news event or watching it on the evening news, 70 percent would wait for the MSM report. The rest of the piece is as predictable as an Onion parody. Straight-faced blogvangelist Dan Gillmor deduces that "In a global economy ... innovation could come from anywhere.''

Poll: Internet now a big part of life [Mercury News]

Remainders: YouTube still doomed

Nick Douglas — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:26:14 EDT

Tech blog GigaOM explains why Fox Interactive won't buy YouTube. For why no one else will, see this Valleywag list. [GigaOM]
Viacom doesn't need YouTube either, thanks to a sweet distribution deal they just cut with Google Video. With this deal, other sites can embed shows from MTV, Comedy Central, and such; the embedded vids carry ads, and Viacom and Google split the revenue. In other words, everything New Media is Old Media again. [International Herald Tribune]
Google is paying $900 million to Fox Interactive if all goes right with its plan to power the search on several Fox sites — most importantly, MySpace. [Battelle's Search Blog]
The San Jose Mercury News discovers, two months after the fact, that blogger Robert Scoble left Microsoft. Call it the "Late Edition." [Mercury News]
Did BusinessWeek backpedal by editing the print version of its "Digg is worth $200 million" story after bloggers tore apart the online version? Or did the magazine always plan tell online readers one thing and print readers another? [Techdirt]
Our big sister Gawker, exploiting the convergence of media and tech to totally step on our turf, reports that tech-media vet Alan Patricof dumped $5 million on the Huffington Post. (Disclosure: Founder Arianna Huffington is Gawker publisher Nick Denton's honorary girlfriend, judging by their party photos. I have a writer's account at the Huffington Post that I never bothered using. Patricof writes for the Huffington Post. One of Patricof's older investments was a startup run by Michael Wolff, who called Patricoff a crank in his book Burn Rate.) [Gawker 1, Gawker 2]

Perks of being Larry: free real estate ads

ndouglas — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 14:02:06 EDT

Reason #78 that it's awesome to be Oracle CEO Larry Ellison: Every now and then, for no apparent reason, the Mercury News will help you sell your house.

For $25 million, live like Larry Ellison, before he traded up [Mercury News]

Mercury News seeing stars in San Jose

ndouglas — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:04:39 EST

Someone at the San Jose Mercury News is pushing for a Walk of Fame in the capital of Silicon Valley. The mayor's itched to put Valley greats out on the street ever since a Mercury News columnist suggested it years ago. Now the idea has a torch-bearer at the paper (unnamed in their article and editorial). And they're saying the inevitable: "Oh my god, let's make it interactive!"

But imagine a "Silicon Valley Walk of Fame'' that featured digital video, or a holographic projection, with audio you could access from your cell phone. Maybe each "star'' would be activated by a silicon chip replica. That could be a fun and sophisticated way to celebrate our stellar geeks.

Until "fun and sophisticated" becomes "embarrassing last-year technology."

S.J. Walk of Fame still a ways off [Mercury News]
Here's a way to let the valley get its stars in alignment [Mercury News]