Gawker: valleywag, usa today

Bearded Twitterati Look Ugly Playing Baseball

Owen Thomas — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:12:28 EDT

One BusinessWeek scribe fussed over his beard, an Ars Technica blogger griped over her ride, and an ABC News reporter got dissed in makeup! The Twitterati's complaints were endless today:

BusinessWeek writer Roben Farzad flaunted his facial hair.

Ars Technica editor Jacqui Cheng bitched about her car rental.

ABC newdude John Berman damned his faint praise.

Wall Street Journal writer Jessica Vascellaro sought pitchers and catchers.

USA Today Detroit bureau chief Sharon Carty planned the next day's coverage.

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

Microsoft hopes you'll make friends through its new banner ads

Nicholas Carlson — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:40:00 EDT

Microsoft-owned ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish has a new product out that's supposed to solve the problem of how easily Web users ignore banner ads. AdLife ads run at the size of a regular banner, but include social features like customer reviews, a feedback button, and of course, user-generated content. AdLife is going through a three-month test right now with publishers WashingtonPost.com, USAToday.com and CircuitCity.com participating. If all goes well and clickthroughs pick up, expect Microsoft to push the product on any agency hoping to advertise on its network. As Avenue A/Razorfish exec Shiv Singh naively put it to AdWeek: "It would be unfair in the long term for it to be totally closed." Singh's title: "global social media lead," which tells us everything we need to know.

USA Today hype crashes Twitter

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:20:00 EDT

Twitter got its big break with mainstream America today — a big article in the free Ramada Inn daily, USA Today. In fact, the article drove so much traffic to Twitter that — whoops — it crashed. Again. "They used to call it the Slashdot Effect," Valleywag's resident Olds Paul Boutin tells me, "Your site would go down right in the middle of your moment of glory." Smartly, though, Twitter PR managed to get USA Today's Jefferson Graham to build an excuse for the site's Love For Fail right into the article. Graham reports:

Twitter has become so popular, so fast, that keeping up with its fast-growing user base is a real issue. So many people now use Twitter to update friends that the system often crashes. That could be about to change. Twitter executives are working feverishly to solve the problem through a new investment. "Twitter took off really quickly, and honestly, we were surprised and had to play a lot of catch-up," says Stone.

Dead-tree newspaper readership down, Web readership up

Jordan Golson — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:25:48 EST

Newspapers sales have fallen 3 percent year-over-year. With the exception of USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, the vast majority of major papers lost subscribers. This year the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry organization that reports subscriber information, included online readership in the report. In the last two years, half of 88 papers examined showed no change or an increase in combined print and online readings. That's good news for the news industry — online readers tend to be younger and more attractive to advertisers. That's fine. Maybe more papers should follow the New York Times' example — they may be just a fancy blog, but that's what the kids are reading these days. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)