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.

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.