All hail the new star on the block. It makes CNET and Wired look woolly and staid (if you even read them any more) and frankly there’s not much like it on this side of the pond. Nick Denton’s Silicon Valley blog, Valleywag, is flying at the moment, finding its voice and building a reputation in tenacious all-sides-covered reporting on Yahoo/Microsoft. Its stats, above, show the strong growth you’d expect of a rising star.
What I find most interesting is how the blog combines news reporting with analysis with satire with too-much-detail-insiderishness, without missing a beat, and managing to get the choice right most of the time. It’s a trick many mainstream media hacks struggle to pull off even after years of practice, and some would even say they don’t have license to do it from cautious editors. But I suspect it’s what this emerging form of blog journalism is all about.
[Later: lest I be accused of being a hopeless fanboy, especially since Valleywag linked to this post overnight, there is an interesting point from a reader, in the comments below, about Valleywag's accuracy, and its savage attacks on people who may not, actually, be public figures. I'd be interested to hear more from people who have more of an inside track on what the site reports - and, indeed, any response from the site's writers and editors.]
Some recent examples of the site’s range, pulled from the RSS feed… exclusive screenshots of an unlaunched Yahoo! service (“The pace of of product launches from Yahoo is breathless — and with a whiff of desperation”) that had, at time of writing this, 1732 Diggs. Or this vicious excoriation of Yahoo’s policy towards click fraud – a piece that wouldn’t look out of place in Britain’s Private Eye , if the Eye covered tech in any sensible way (Valleywaggers can be even more nasty towards individuals they don’t like, in a way that would garner a libel suit in the UK pretty quickly. No, I’m not linking to an example, but if you look through its savage profiles of some of the Yahoo layoffs you’ll see what I mean). Or this interesting bit of news analysis on Apple’s problems in China, where there are 400,000 iPhones running unlocked on China Mobile.
One voice, a range of styles. Also interesting (and worrying) for established journalism: they freely admit to getting things wrong in the race to be first with stuff. Perhaps the most famous example was last summer’s false claim that a drunk datacentre employee had blacked out “all of the websites you care about”. They were put right, and ‘fessed up quickly – “Drunk editor kills the gossip item you care about” – and seem to have been forgiven by most readers.
Maybe it’s because it portrays itself as a scrappy little outlet, where 100% accuracy is less important than entertainment and attitude. Maybe it’s because readers don’t mind so long as you get it right eventually. Maybe it’s a challenge to old-fashioned journalism, maybe it’ll all end in tears.
It’ll be interesting to watch. For now, loving their work, in a I-think-this-might-be-significant sort of way.
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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS
JohnofScribbleSheet thought this on Feb 19 08 at 10:55 amWhen Valleywag launched people expected it to be a news source, but its mostly a gossip blog for people in tech valley world. It doesnt always get things right, in fact i think its mostly off key. BUT! Its always an entertaining read.
Tom thought this on Feb 20 08 at 5:41 amThe problem is, Neil, that almost all of the stories that I have any knowledge of are not only wrong but scurrilously and revoltingly wrong. Specifically they’re wrong to the kind of extent that would not work in the UK because they’d have been sued back into the stone ages.
Seriously, the crap that I’ve heard recently about the place that I work that I *know* is untrue massively outweighs the facts. In every story concerned with the place I work (of which there have been several over the last few months), I should think sentences that were actually correct constituted about 10% of the actual stuff they said. There’s normally some vague distorted fragment of truth somewhere in the story, but they spin it out indefinitely in all directions.
And under the control of Owen Thomas it’s got positively vicious. Really smart decent people who don’t really consider themselves to be public figures and celebrities are getting eviscerated and humiliated (while other people who actually deserve it) are getting away scot-free. People I rate and respect have been seriously hurt by it, and I really would encourage you not to consider it in any way a decent role-model for any journalist!
Some of the people who have progressed from Valleywag to other magazines have had to be retrained pretty much from scratch to be decent human beings and ethical journalists. What you’re celebrating here is the entertainment that comes from reading vicious and aggressive ad hominem attacks, sexual fantasy and (well) lies.
Neil Mc thought this on Feb 20 08 at 7:59 amTom – that’s an interesting comment, and worrying.
It’s difficult, certainly, to judge the accuracy of what they’re saying from this distance – I’m in London, it’s in Silicon Valley, and mostly writing about there. Of the stories that are later stood up by events, or by elsewhere, it seems to me their success rate is better than 10%, although I accept mileage may vary. And, as I maybe didn’t make clear, I agree with you on the personal attacks; some of the stuff they write about figures you’d not normally regard as public is savage, indeed. But I also put some of my squeamishness down to cultural differences – I work for a very different publication, in a different country, and may draw the public figure=fair game line a little earlier. I worry about what it does to careers already damaged by, say, redundancy.
What I’m celebrating, if anything, is the written style of the thing, which I find very interesting from a slightly journowonky perspective – that change of tone is hard to pull off again and again. But even if they’re half as bad as you say they are, they may have a problem in the long run. Although journalism, more generally, has the problem right now because accurate or not, this stuff is wildly successful…
If any other readers have thoughts on the accuracy or otherwise of their reporting, I’d be interested to hear more.
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