Housekeeping: Owen Thomas is the Valleywag
Owen Thomas, the Business 2.0 editor whom we've lured to run Valleywag, is all smiles. But don't be deceived. This Silicon Valley gossip rag, after he takes over in July as managing editor, will remain as obnoxious as ever.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gawker Media's Valleywag has spent six months remaking itself: the November 2006 New York Times memo on Valleywag getting down to business marked its shift from pure gossip toward business-news coverage, and the site had already shown teeth with scoops like the internal Netscape traffic numbers it obtained around Calacanis's departure commentary. Hiring Owen Thomas away from Business 2.0 — where he was an editor — to take over as managing editor in July completes that pivot with a print-trained business journalist.
The pickup by GigaOM and Kara Swisher's BoomTown on the same day shows the hire registered well beyond Gawker's own network: in Silicon Valley's small media circle, a Business 2.0 editor decamping for a gossip blog was treated as industry news in its own right.
First-order effects
- Business 2.0 loses one of its editors to a rival format, while Valleywag gains a managing editor whose stated mandate — per the announcement — is to keep the site exactly as obnoxious as ever.
- Thomas takes the Valleywag helm in July with both a business-journalism Rolodex and a gossip outlet's license to publish what Business 2.0's editing standards would never run.
Second-order effects
- Competing Silicon Valley outlets like TechCrunch, GigaOM and BoomTown now face a gossip blog with legitimate sourcing depth, forcing the trade press to compete on speed and access rather than treating snark sites as beneath them.
- For sources and PR operators, the line between 'on the record for a magazine' and 'fair game for a gossip rag' blurs once the same person holds both instincts — raising the stakes of every off-hand remark at a conference or demo day.
Third-order effects
- If blog networks keep recruiting print-trained editors — Gawker Media staffing Valleywag with a Business 2.0 editor being one data point — the talent wall between legacy business magazines and blogs erodes, and blogs become a credible career destination rather than a side show.
- That migration points toward a structural convergence in which the scoop economy, not the masthead, defines who counts as a technology journalist — with advertising dollars following whoever breaks news first.
The trend: Mid-2000s blog networks are hiring print-trained business editors, collapsing the boundary between Silicon Valley gossip blogging and mainstream technology journalism.