BoomTown » Megan McCarthy

Who Shot Valleywag? Gossip Bloggers Thomas (Outgoing) and Tate (Incoming) Speak!

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:20:43 +0000

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell always controversial Valleywag gossip blogger Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.”

There, the 37-year-old Thomas will run a site that focuses on news from around the San Francisco region, with a mix of national stories. But, sources said, he is still going to continue to drill down on tech too, so those burned before by him should not relax too much.

Thomas has been running Valleywag since mid-2007. Its staff got pretty large for a while, until it was recently downsized and its content stuffed into Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media. The Valleywag site remains, though, and will continue to.

And it will now be the domain of deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate, Thomas’s replacement. The Berkeley resident, 32, has been the night editor for Gawker since early last year.

Interestingly, Tate was an intern for The Wall Street Journal’s California edition and also worked for tech-oriented publications like Business 2.0, Upside and the San Francisco Business Times.

Thomas is reportedly staying on at Valleywag through the middle of the month and then it will be Tate’s turn to make mischief with tech’s more puffed-up mandarins.

In an effort to scare Tate into steering clear of BoomTown, I invited the pair to All Things Digital HQ this rainy afternoon for a little sit-down to discuss where the controversial site has been and where it is going.

Here’s the video (and below it, a video interview I did with Thomas and then-Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy, when he got the job):

[ See post to watch video ]

Short People Got No Reason to Vlog?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 07:05:02 +0000

Leave it to the freakishly tall Megan McCarthy of Valleywag to impugn our stature at BoomTown.

In her post late last week that I missed (I was traveling and therefore not aware of her cruel, cruel taunts), she pointed with dread to a recent promise I made to try out a new wearable camera I saw at the TechCrunch40 conference earlier in the week, a la Justin Kan of Justin.tv.

Writes McCarthy:

One thing to keep in mind about this new development: Swisher, unlike Kan, is tiny–about 5′2″, if that. Any hat-camera she wears will be eye-level with Silicon Valley’s chest. We look forward to watching her conversations with Walt Mossberg’s sweater.”

First off, I am 5′2″ (really!!) and not a “little person” as one VC once called me.

Second, Walt never wears sweaters.

And third: Chest-level was the plan, if you must know!

Silicon Valley’s chest=big traffic!

Or as Valleywag overlord Owen Thomas added to the post in note wherein he also harasses my innocent employee, Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski:

Rowr.

Valleywag Wags About, Well, Valleywag

Kara Swisher — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:24:30 +0000

I had an entertaining lunch with Owen Thomas and Megan McCarthy, both of Valleywag, the Silicon Valley online gossip rag that is part of the Gawker Media blogging empire.

(Megan had asked for some advice about the fine art of covering parties–that is, making an interesting story where there is not one–since I started my career covering parties for the Washington Post.)

Thomas, whom I have know for many years, is the new managing editor of Valleywag, a gig he got in July after many years as an editor and writer at Business 2.0 magazine.

Here is a talk with him about the state of the blog and Valleywag’s focus under him, as well as an appearance by McCarthy, and more info after the jump:

[ See post to watch video ]

Thomas has a lot of digital experience, too, as a contributor to the legendarily snarky Suck site, and he was an early convert in the mainstream media to the inevitability of the digital space. His last job at Business 2.0 was as online editor for the Time Inc. title.

Thomas’s predecessor was Gawker publisher and impresario Nick Denton, in fact, who took over writing the blog after he sacked its first editor, Nick Douglas (who still writes posts regularly for Valleywag). Soon enough, Denton fired himself and hired Thomas.

In his post on the move, Denton said: “You see, Thomas isn’t just a veteran of business journalism, with excellent sources in the tech industry (most of which he will burn).”

And indeed, so far Thomas has been busy slapping around the denizens of Silicon Valley (including me for being too nice to Yahoo U.S. sales head Dave Karnstedt) with the newfound vigor of a man freed from the mainstream media.

Not everyone likes it, finding some posts too snarky and cutting, but everyone does seem to read it.