Gawker: valleywag, vanity fair

Is Yahoo Ready for Its Closeup?

Owen Thomas — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:48:43 EDT

Vanity Fair contributor is reportedly working on an epic feature about Yahoo.

The Twitterati Are Worried You Think They're Gay

Owen Thomas — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:58:51 EDT

Ryan Seacrest's executive producer feared seeming fey, CNET's Natali Del Conte feared losing marbles, and Bob Woodruff feared he wouldn't be popular on Twitter. And if you read Twitter all day, you'd be afraid too:

CNET adorablogger Natali Del Conte forgot her PIN.

Dennis Clark, executive producer of Ryan Seacrest's radio show, had a moment of gay panic.

Broadcasting and Cable's Alex Weprin steeled himself for an encounter with hunkiness.

Vanity Fair online editor Mike Hogan assiduously pursued Internet fame.

Wounded ABC newsman Bob Woodruff sought help from a Twitter veteran.

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

Twitter, the Whiner's Best Friend!

Owen Thomas — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:04:58 EDT

Want to complain about someone? Media people who love to whine, from L.A. to Austin to Washington, all turn to Twitter to air their beefs. Gripes from a Ryan Seacrest wordsmith and others today:

Vanity Fair online editor Mike Hogan complained about the food at South By Southwest.

Washington Times columnist complained about a cell-phone using idiot at a White House press conference, whom she later identified as John Gizzi of Human Events.

Salon.com correspondent Mike Madden engaged in conversation with his readers.

Natalie Eshaya, a writer for Ryan Seacrest, outed her boss's drinking problem.

Chris Nuttall of the Financial Times experienced a moment of sheer geek panic.

See something worth noting on Twitter? Please email us your favorite tweets — or send us more Twitter usernames.

Michael Arrington didn't even make Vanity Fair's kiddie-table list

Owen Thomas — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:40:00 EDT

This weekend's San Jose Mercury News profile of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, so obsequiously flattering that some wondered whether the writer was auditioning for a job at the tech blog, included an inadvertent slam. Evidence of Arrington's importance: According to TechCrunch marketing VP Sarah Ross, Arrington was considered for Vanity Fair's "New Establishment" power list, but didn't make the final cut. So he's sort of famous, right? Just one problem with that theory.

If Arrington was, as his flack claims, considered and discarded from the main list, why didn't he show up on Vanity Fair's "Next Establishment," a collection of up-and-coming also-rans? Startup types like Ali and Hadi Partovi, the cofounders of music widget iLike, appeared there, though they're pretty much unknown outside the Valley. In this beauty contest, Arrington didn't even get the consolation prize. (Photo by Maria Avila/San Jose Mercury News)

"No, it's $40 for one song. You have to buy your own drinks, and there's no touching."

Jackson West — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:00:00 EDT

YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley imposes on former secretary of state and world famous skirt-chaser Henry Kissinger at the party thrown by Google and Vanity Fair on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. You know how this works — best caption suggested in the comments becomes the new headline. Yesterday's winner was WagCurious for "Apparently everything gets past security these days." (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

Once again, Vanity Fair leaves geeks at the kids' power table

Owen Thomas — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list:

Wendi Deng Murdoch, MySpace China
Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, MySpace
Max Levchin, Slide
Robin Li, Baidu
Markos Moulitsas, DailyKos
Elon Musk, SpaceX
Ali and Hadi Partovi, iLike
Mika Salmi, MTV
Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh
Quincy Smith, CBS
Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times
Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital
Evan Williams, Twitter
Andrew Zolli, PopTech

Five Gawker Sites on Vanity Fair's Blog Map

Erin Pettigrew — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 21:28:01 EDT

Vanity Fair's "Blogopticon" is a cheeky, visual response to the question: "Who's worth reading on the Internet?" The diagram arrays the web's most influential blogs by tone and content and includes five of our titles:

Jezebel
Valleywag
Consumerist
Gawker
Defamer

From Vanity Fair: View the Blogopticon and Read the Article.

Vanity Fair displays new media acumen with "Blogopticon"

Jackson West — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:00:00 EDT

In a wonderful piece of linkbait, Vanity Fair produced an illustration featuring a number of popular "blogs" arranged in a cartesian graph from "Scurrolous" to "Earnest" on one axis and "Opinion" to "News" on another. While we're trying to grasp how the 'Wag ended up on the earnest side of the scale, more confusing is the inclusion of Salon and Slate. Apparently, if you're not printed on paper, you're a "blog" — even though both publications predate the term. But where the chart really gets things wrong is in using the disembodied head of Amanda Congdon to illustrate online video program Rocketboom. If the authors or illustrator actually watched the show or read many of the listed blogs, they'd know that Joanne Colan took over as host after a very nasty and public departure from the show by Congdon. Keep trying, guys, you're bound to figure out this Internet thing eventually!

The Internet according to "Vanity Fair" — the 100-word version

Jackson West — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:40:00 EDT

In a nine-chapter opus, Vanity Fair clean-up hitter Keenan "Coverline" Mayo and Peter Newcomb pitch the inevitable book deal for an oral history of the Internet. In it are all sorts of unchallenged assertions by various leading lights, from early stories of the Arpanet to Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams complaining about getting friend invites from "Pounce" when he's not taking undue credit for building the first social network. (Six Degrees, anyone?) But what stood out to me were two anecdotes that illustrate the plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose nature of business in America. Namely, the cycle of monopolies which the Internet has done little to stop and will probably spin Google's way next. After the jump, 100 words that changed the world — without the pleasantly distracting Angelina Jolie pop-up ads spewed by the Vanity Fair website.

First, Paul Baran discusses his invention of packet-switching while working at the Rand Corporation, which allowed for data to route through multiple nodes on a network, and the reception it received by then-monopoly AT&T:

The one hurdle packet switching faced was AT&T. They fought it tooth and nail at the beginning. They tried all sorts of things to stop it. They pretty much had a monopoly in all communications. And somebody from outside saying that there’s a better way to do it of course doesn’t make sense.

Less than thirty years later, it was Microsoft's turn to play the heavy with their Windows monopoly when meeting with Marc Andreesen and the rest of the team at Netscape's offices in the Valley, as told by Netscape's counsel at the time Gary Reback:

A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us.

Robot CEO smuggles human wife into movie premiere

Jackson West — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:00:00 EDT

We'd grown so accustomed to seeing Google CEO Eric Schmidt squiring girlfriends to events that we couldn't believe our eyes. Was that attractive blonde on his arm actually his wife, Wendy? The couple eschewed the red carpet when entering the Castro Theater for last night's Vanity Fair-sponsored screening of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for the San Francisco International Film Festival, but our paparazzo still managed to snap a shot of the publicity-averse Mrs. Schmidt. (Some insiders suggest that Wendy, a graduate of UC Berkeley's journalism school, was behind Eric's temporary boycott of News.com after the website published their home address.) Can you suggest a better caption? Do so in the comments. Yesterday's winner: "Handvertising is the new banner ad," by loganvision. (Photo by Steve Rhodes)

Who's going to TechTalk Menorca, the Balearic boondoggle?

Owen Thomas — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:20:00 EDT

Martin Varsavsky, the founder of Wi-Fi startup Fon, has concocted another excuse for Web 2.0's jet set to rack up frequent-flier miles and buy carbon offsets: It's called Menorca TechTalk, held on Varsavsky's ranch on the Mediterranean island this weekend. The website is password-protected, but Valleywag got a list of who's going. It's a curious mix of professional conference attendees, like Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman, Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, and David Sifry of Technorati, mixed in with a few people who have day jobs. There are even Googlers on the list — and when have you known those lot to leave the protective bubble of Mountain View? Oddly, Jimmy Wales did not seem to make the cut, though his New York patroness, Louise Blouin MacBain, is listed. In the comments, sort the TechTalkers into your preferred categories.

Alan Levy (BlogTalkRadio)
Alec Oxenford (OLX, DineroMail)
Alejandro Estrada (DineroMail)
Alexis Bonte (Erepublik.com)
Andrew McLaughlin (Google)
Anil de Mello (Mobuzz)
Arturo J. Paniagua (Hipertextual)
Auren Hoffman (Rapleaf)
Axel Schmiegelow (Sevenload, Denkwerk Group)
Benjamí Villoslada (Menèame)
Brent Hoberman (Mydeco)
Carlos Martìn (IG Expansiòn)
Cedric Maloux
Christophe F. Maire (Nokia gate5, investor)
Claudia Gisiger-Gonzalez (UNHCR)
Dan Dubno (Blowing Things Up)
David Sifry (Technorati)
Demian M. Bellumio (Cyloop)
Eduardo Arcos (Hipertextual)
Efe Cakarel (The Auteurs)
Ehssan Dariani (studiVZ)
Esteban Sosnik
Esther Dyson (EDventure)
Felix Petersen (Plazes)
Hans Peter Brøndmo (Plum)
Ibrahim Evsan (Sevenload)
Ivan Communod (Vpod.tv)
Jacob Hsu (Symbio)
James Gutierrez (Progress Financial)
Jennifer L. Schenker (BusinessWeek)
John Markoff (The New York Times)
Joichi Ito (Creative Commons, Six Apart Japan, investor)
Jon Berrojalbiz (Trading Motion)
Jonas Birgersson (Labs2)
Jörg Rohleder (Vanity Fair)
José María Figueres (Grupo Felipe IV)
Jose Marin (IG Expansion)
Julio Alonso (Weblogs SL)
Lars Hinrichs (XING)
Loïc Le Meur (Seesmic)
Louise T Blouin MacBain (Louise Blouin Media)
Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com, investor)
Lukasz Wejchert (Onet.pl)
Marc Samwer (European Founders Fund)
Marcelo Claure (Brightstar Corp.)
Marko Ahtisaari (Blyk, Dopplr, FON)
Mathias Entenmann (Betfair)
Matt Biddulph (Dopplr)
Megan Smith (Google)
Michael Arrington (Techcrunch)
Michael Jackson (Mangrove Capital Partners)
Michael Wolf (Farallon Point)
Nikesh Arora (Google)
Ola Ahlvarsson (Result, FON)
Om Malik (Giga Omni Media)
R.J. Friedlander (Grupo Planeta)
Ricardo Galli (Menéame)
Rodrigo Sepúlveda Schulz (Vpod.tv)
Rupert Schäfer (DLD, Hubert Burda Media)
Scott Rafer (Lookery, Mashery, Winksite)
Tariq Krim (Netvibes)
Thomas Crampton (Next Media)

Michael Wolff's Steve Jobs: "at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut"

ndouglas — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 10:03:17 EST

With five days until Apple's 30th anniversary, a gaggle of news outlets are boldly writing the story we've never heard: "Apple is not like Microsoft!"

Honestly, Apple's gotten a teensy bit of superlative-laden press before. But the deification of Jobs soars to new, insane heights with a story in everyone's favorite tech mag, Vanity Fair. Michael Wolff — who took a lot of people's money in the dot-com boom, lost it, and wrote a book about it — drops to his knees in front of the Saint of Shiny Gadgets.

And what a vocabulary of worship! Here's a handy guide to:

Phrases Michael Wolff invented for Vanity Fair's Steve Jobs profile
¬ unbusinesses
¬ at-one-with-the-American-consumer golden gut
¬ official One-Eyed Man
¬ disorder-ish
¬ metrosexual-ish
¬ powerful boomer gene
¬ this virtual, transubstantiating age
¬ superhomes
¬ Two-jobs Jobs
¬ functional sainthood

Phrases Michael Wolff borrowed that Marshall McLuhan wants back. Now.
¬ The medium is the message.

iPod, therefore I am [Vanity Fair]