Nick Denton Is Resurrecting Valleywag
Valleywag, a Silicon Valley gossip blog Gawker killed off in 2009, is making a comeback. — Nick Denton, Gawker's CEO and founder, says he'll be bringing the site back to life, and he's currently hunting for an editor or two to run it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Valleywag has cycled through the full Gawker lifecycle once already: it launched into a business-focused memo in 2006, was mocked into self-awareness by its own subjects by late 2007 — the same season Gawker installed a familiar editor at the helm — and was shut down in 2009, even as Denton insisted that year that original reporting would be rewarded.
The 2013 revival is therefore less a new bet than a re-run with the benefit of hindsight: Denton is publicly hunting one or two editors before relaunch, and the story traveled fast the same day — PandoDaily wrote it up and a cluster of tech journalists, including Peter Kafka and Matt Buchanan, passed it around on Twitter, signaling an audience primed for the site's return.
First-order effects
- Denton's immediate task is editorial staffing: without one or two hires who can land Silicon Valley scoops, the revived masthead is just a URL, and the candidates he courts are drawn from the same small pool of tech-media writers his competitors rely on.
- Silicon Valley founders and executives who had four years free of Valleywag's scrutiny are back on the target list from day one.
Second-order effects
- Rival tech outlets — PandoDaily among them, given it covered the news itself — now compete against a Gawker-owned gossip brand whose model is built for traffic spikes, pressuring them to match its appetite for personality-driven coverage rather than straight reporting.
- The editor search itself becomes a market signal: whoever Denton hires sets whether the relaunched site leans toward the snark that produced the 2007 'frigtards' era or the original-reporting standard he articulated in 2009.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, dormant media brands become recyclable assets — shut down when they underperform, revived when attention economics favor provocation — which changes how owners value archives and mastheads versus building new titles.
- Tech coverage structurally oscillates between boosterism and accountability journalism, and each revival of a gossip franchise like Valleywag pushes the whole beat toward the adversarial pole.
The trend: Media owners are increasingly treating closed blogs as restartable brands, resurrecting proven mastheads when the traffic economics of provocation turn favorable again.