<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, valleywag, melissa gira grant]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, valleywag, melissa gira grant]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/melissagiragrant http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/melissagiragrant <![CDATA[Shakeups for the Hard Core]]> A news legend bid his typewriter farewell; people planned their post-New-York-Times futures; and the new wave were overwhelmed by work. The Twitterati were at a fracture point.

NPR's Daniel Schorr, who once worked with Edward R. Murrow, gave a heartfelt goodbye to his typewriter. On Twitter! Wow.

People were also talking about striking out in new directions at the New York Times, on buyout day.

Writer and ex Valleywagger Melissa Gira Grant has no fucking time. Or, rather, no "non fucking" time. It's fucking overwhelming!

Blogger and entrepreneur Tom Bridge isn't asking for a perfectly ordered society. Just the basics.

The Wall Street Journal's Colleen Debaise really appreciates your interview for her video "Creating Buzz," owner of Bill's Bar & Burger. Here, have some "check [it] out" buzz!


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

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<![CDATA[Foodies Get Smug, Then Porn]]> Ruth Riechl got smug over her soul-food meal on a train and Michael Bauer's readers got porn from his tweets. The Twitterati learned to watch what they ate.

San Francisco Chronicle food and wine editor Michael Bauer blamed a "gremlin" for the porn surprise in his Twitter feed. His readers blamed themselves for not consuming his feed when it was fresher (and more porny).

Radio host Billy Bush basically said you're either with Twitter or you're with the terrorists.

Writer and former Valleywag-er Melissa Gira Grant finally observed mass-market gossip in its native habitat.

Former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl might not have her food magazine, but she still has her "smug" sense of culinary superiority.

Science writer Mark Drapeau will not join your stupid "wave."



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

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<![CDATA[The Rebel Yell of the Twitterati]]> David Simon told television viewers to go screw themselves; Jane Fonda established a rallying point for her fellow travelers and Choire Sicha and David Carr watched a bust go down. The Twitterati celebrated troublemakers.



The New York Times' David Carr and The Awl's Choire Sicha went to lunch. Inevitably, this involved illicit substances.



Time's Joel Stein found something even better than Facebook.



Gawker contributor Melissa Gira Grant discovered herself at the unhappy intersection of viral marketing and an ex.



Financial writer Lyneka Little felt self-consciously stalky.



Internet music entrepreneur Ian Rogers likes it when the creator of The Wire gets a little cranky.



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

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<![CDATA['Well-Designed' Orgasms, Voice Mail Important to Twitterati]]> AT&T failed to give Adam Frucci a sense of childlike wonder about his iPhone; Jimmy Jane's mobile device proved more satisfying to Melissa Gira Grant and Ana Marie Cox damned an internet conference with faint praise.

The Twitterati were discerning customers today.


Gizmodo associate editor Adam Frucci's outgoing voice mail message is about to get really interesting.


AFP's Olivier Knox stumbled onto a fascinating interview.


Gakwer contributor Melissa Gira Grant wrote up a gadget review, on spec.


The New Yorker's Susan Orlean doesn't see Mark Sanford shooting the breeze with, say, Eliot Spitzer; the adulterous politician would apparently run with a more southern crowd.


When it comes to conference proliferation, Air America's Ana Marie Cox really does hate freedom.


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

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<![CDATA[How to dump your Web 2.0 girlfriend, boyfriend or whateverfriend]]> How do you deal with a derailed relationship that's still on Facebook — and Twitter, and Tumblr, and FriendFeed, and a couple dozen blogs? Recently-outsourced Valleywag writer Melissa Gira Grant wrote a how-to for chick-culture site The Frisky after dealing with a breakup firsthand. It's aimed at young women, but applies to anyone. I'm happy to report Melissa's writing is tight enough that she needs no 100-word version.

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<![CDATA[Why we couldn't stop reading Melissa Gira Grant]]> Go ahead, call Melissa Gira Grant a "hooker." From the first, she hooked Valleywag readers with her provocative insights into how sex, money, and technology collided. We first hired her to write a column on the sex trade, and she became a sought-after expert when the Eliot Spitzer-Ashley Dupré scandal exploded on the Web. But her talents soon overflowed the confines of that narrow subject. What's next for Melissa? She's in the market for a programmer for her sex-map startup, Boffery, and she'll continue writing at melissagira.com.

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<![CDATA[Valleywag cuts 60 percent of staff]]> We would never sugarcoat someone else's layoffs. Why ours? Gawker Media, our publisher, has told me to cut Valleywag's costs, in anticipation of an advertising recession. In response, I have laid off associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant. They have all been doing excellent work, breaking stories and needling Silicon Valley. But our ultimate boss, Nick Denton, has decided he can't afford them. Paul Boutin and I will continue running the site. Denton's memo:

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.

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<![CDATA[Startup to fill need for more sex maps]]> Boffery.com is a beta (whatever that means now) social networking site by Valleywag part-timer Melissa Gira Grant and a few of her friends. Boffery lets you chart your network of hookups, making you valuable and accessible to 51-year-old newspaper reporters assigned to write about these crazy kids humping each other via Twitter. Who said you can't sleep your way to fame? Note to Melissa: Post some screenshots if you want any more press than this.

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<![CDATA[How Xeni and Violet's Boing Boing affair went sour]]> What turned culture-jamming tech blog Boing Boing into the kind of censorious monster it normally ridicules? Beyond its initial statement that the reasons are "personal," Boing Boing hasn't elaborated, but all signs point to the foundering of a once-romantic friendship between Boing Boing editor Xeni Jardin and Violet Blue, the sex blogger whose many links from Boing Boing were erased last year. (Full disclosure: Jardin is Valleywag's favorite gendertastic sex-robot space princess from the future, while Violet Blue has contributed to Fleshbot, a porn blog published by Valleywag owner Gawker Media. Blue once approached Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant for sex, but was rebuffed.) In an email to Valleywag, pasted below, Blue continues to profess ignorance of what she did wrong; she also dismisses her entanglement with Jardin as a friendship laced with casual sex. Blue's own photo of the two at Kink.com party, shown here, suggests, in its entangled limbs, that the relationship was more serious than that.

For Blue, we've come to believe, the friendship always had a mercenary angle — Jardin could get her linked as well as laid. The association with Boing Boing boosted Blue's career. How painful it must have been for Jardin to realize she was being used by a groupie who wanted to join her band. And people in pain exercise supremely bad judgment, which is what Jardin did when she "unpublished" posts about Blue from Boing Boing. She must have wanted to forget all about Blue. In a tragic example of the Streisand effect, Jardin's actions have made it all the harder to do so. Violet Blue's little-girl-lost email:

you know, I really honestly have no fucking idea. romance? well, it is true that Xeni and I has casual sex a few times years ago, but we never had a relationship and the friendship continued when the sex stopped happening — well before the alleged year ago that the posts were nuked. but perhaps she was looking for a reason not to like me anymore? thing is, I don't know what that reason would be. no one told me I'd done anything wrong, they just secretively removed the content (even, I've discovered, content not about me but just a mention of my name). I can't imagine how I went from years of being beloved by the BB crew to being such a despicable character that they would do something so extreme and well, rather insane. or, actually reading through the comments on the BB post about it, one person. there's one comment where Pesco makes it clear that one person did this.

I'd really like to see a public discussion about what one person could do to deserve what is now unquestionably punishment. can someone please show me what I did wrong? and tell me why no one told me I did something wrong? no, that would mean being really honest and transparent. I can't think of a single event a year ago that would make BoingBoing remove all those posts (and yes, it was upward of 100 — I have records of 72 of them, and there were certainly more).

what's most disturbing to me is to see them trying to pull a smoke and mirrors on the whole thing. and that they only responded when the LAT piece went up — not when the blogosphere was demanding answers. they've handled this so badly from day 1. deleting comments, ignoring it for a week, doing the thing in the first place and not telling anyone, saying it's a big sekrit, and pretending to have a discussion about... nothing. you'd think for being such media figures they'd know how to play this game better.

from my comments:

Xeni's comment ( http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/01/that-violet-blue-thi.html#comment-223265 ) really makes me laugh:

"Blog fights are stupid, airing personal grievances in public is stupid"

Then why delete all the posts? Why not just not just cut future ties and no one will ever know the difference?

/comment

oh, and here's my sheet with all the posts — you can see even Xeni's personal Guatemala post was removed, as was other non-sex news my name just happened to pop up in. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pzVyO44trg7yCes1ugr7DFg

so, how does one get to be so bad, so evil and so notorious that even the 800 lb. gorilla of the blogosphere sacrifices their integrity to stay away from you? you could ask me, but I have no idea. and BoingBoing's not telling.

I didn't do anything wrong.

xo

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<![CDATA[Muppets soothe pain of lame April Fools' Day]]>
Melissa Gira Grant sends me an IM: "Were you a Muppets fan? I can't believe how dirty this outtakes clip is." Carefully done and stupidly funny.

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<![CDATA[A week that brought us to our knees]]> Did Amazon.com run out of kneepads? Jerry Yang begged Rupert Murdoch to save his company from Microsoft. Rush Limbaugh begged Steve Jobs for tech support. Three of you sent emails begging us to stop running Melissa Gira Grant's posts about sex and money in Silicon Valley. Thousands of you begged us not to. And we all saluted Willie Brown, San Francisco's thoroughly corrupt mayor who legalized one other thing that brings us low.

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<![CDATA[Friday at Moose's: Bad Girls Part 2]]> We've created a monster. Moose's Friday has become a power clique for brainy women in heels. Tired of "cocky pretend business moguls" as one put it, the Valley's bad girls have chosen to hang out with us cocky pretend writers instead. Come on over from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. in North Beach. New pageview champ Melissa Gira Grant (left) will tell you how to raise your rates. DO NOT wear a hoodie, or Splunk VP of Fashion Christina Noren will drag you into the ladies room and make you over, like a ZZ Top video. Dress up, people, we got into this biz for the shiny shiny glamour.

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<![CDATA[Bad girls, straight up]]> Bad girls and boysDid you know some heathens ask for a martini on the rocks? And how many advertisers does AdBrite really have? That was just some of the bits of scandal I overheard at Valleywag's Bad Girl Friday, our happy hour turned welcome wagon for new writer Melissa Gira Grant. Check the photos for more evidence of revelry. Oh, and what is Valleywag emeritus Nick Douglas doing with Grant? Their Facebook profiles say they're "in an open relationship," but I've mentally slotted it under "it's complicated" — even I don't want to know the details.

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