Silicon Valley likes to keep the media on a tight leash. Tech executives expect obedience, if not reverence, from reporters. They dole out information as grudgingly as possible. Sometimes they simply buy a chunk of a publication, a time-honored method of influencing what is deemed fit to write about.
Gawker Media’s Valleywag declined to play the game.
It was a gossip sheet for the digital age: abrasive, knowing, cynical, self-promoting, sometimes unfair. It dispensed snark by the truckload, printing things that people knew or surmised, but were off the table.
It said Google cofounder Larry Page had dated his then-colleague, Marissa Mayer. That then-Google chairman Eric Schmidt was a playboy and a scamp. That Napster cofounder and early Facebook executive Sean Parker’s wedding was seriously over the top.
Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, was gay.
Outing famous people has a long and not particularly respectable history, but Valleywag said it was celebrating Thiel.
The point, as Valleywag’s then-editor Owen Thomas wrote in his post, was that even in Silicon Valley, “a gay investor has no way to fit into the old establishment. That frees him or her to build a different, hopefully better system for identifying and rewarding talented individuals, and unleashing their work on the world.”
This was gossip with an attitude and an agenda. And what it unleashed was Thiel’s ire. He secretly financed a suit brought by US wrestler Hulk Hogan against Valleywag’s parent, Gawker Media, which has resulted in US$140 million in damages. Gawker is appealing.
The revelation of Thiel’s involvement in the suit last week brings the complicated relationship of Silicon Valley and the media to the forefront. The technology world is ever more important and richer, with smartphones in everyone’s pocket conveying a stream of news that Silicon Valley not only delivers, but helps shape. At the same time, the tech companies and their leaders are less transparent about what they do.
“Silicon Valley is a closed world and has become more closed at the elite levels,” said Fred Turner, chairman of the department of communication at Stanford University, California. “The gossip that circulates between people doesn’t always leap into the media the way it might in New York. So Americans know the Valley primarily through its advertising, its self-promotion and its products.”
Valleywag challenged that, and the Valley — or at least Thiel — pushed back.
“We should not be surprised that they act like entitled industrialists out here, because they are,” Turner said.
Valleywag was born in 2006, an arm of Gawker’s then-expanding empire of blogs, and it died last winter. It had a hiatus or two along the way, with Gawker founder Nick Denton stepping in to write the blog at one point. Its most influential years were in the beginning, especially under Thomas, who ran the site from 2007 until 2009.
“On one hand the reporting was terribly caustic and brutal and on the other it was really thorough and investigative and accurate in a lot of cases,” said Brandee Barker, former head of global communications at Facebook, who left the social network in 2010. “I would read a story and think, ‘How on earth did they find this information that is correct?’ Other times I’d read Valleywag and think, ‘This is the most evil and unfair characterization of somebody I’ve ever read in journalism.’”
Gawker Media executive editor John Cook, who helped put Valleywag to rest last year, said the site “didn’t play the access game.”
Thomas, now business editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, said the goal of Valleywag was to improve the tech community.
“Silicon Valley said it had ideals,” he said. “All we asked was that it live up to those ideals. If you’re going to say that you’re a meritocracy, then don’t hire all of your buddies to launch a start-up who all happen to be young white men. Don’t say you’re apolitical when you’re secretly funding anti-immigration measures.”
For Thiel, taking action against Gawker might be a win. Dan Lyons, an author who was briefly a Valleywag writer, said what Thiel did “sets a scary precedent,” but “my guess is that most people hate Gawker as much as he does, so he probably ends up looking like a hero among his own crowd.”
That response was not long in coming. Scott Adams, whose Dilbert cartoon is a satirical look at the modern workplace, on Wednesday wrote on his blog that “this is another example in which I think citizens are taking a more active role in fixing the world when government isn’t the right tool for the job.”
Adams wrote approvingly of Thiel, “I assume he is acting out of a combination of revenge and a desire to make the world a better place.”
Without last week’s news, Valleywag’s legacy would be uncertain. Several Silicon Valley figures asked to comment on Wednesday said they had not read it or did not know it was defunct.
Others, like Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, an occasional Valleywag target, said simply about the site and last week’s events, “I don’t care about any of those people.”
The news about Thiel funding the suit against Gawker arose just as the previous contretemps about Silicon Valley and the media — how Facebook shapes the news that its users see, sparked by a story in Gizmodo, another Gawker property — was dying down. Thiel, as it happens, is a Facebook board member. Facebook declined to comment on Thiel.
Thomas, who is himself gay, argues that Valleywag was not really outing Thiel.
“I did discuss his sexuality, but it was known to a wide circle who felt that it was not fit for discussion beyond that circle,” he said. “I don’t believe he was in the closet. He was never hiding it.”
However much Valleywag said it admired Thiel for being “the smartest VC in the world,” it took a more disparaging view as well.
In one post about Thiel’s claims of hiring only the best to work at his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, Thomas wrote, “Oh, really? Take a look at their resumes on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian’s theses, the claim sounds good on paper, but doesn’t stand up to inspection.”
Thiel returned the favor, calling Valleywag “the Silicon Valley equivalent of al-Qaeda.”
“It scares everybody,” he said in a 2009 interview with Pe Hub, a private equity publication. “It’s terrible for the Valley, which is supposed to be about people who are willing to think out loud and be different. I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters.”
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