When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting. After all, TechCrunch’s founder, Mike Arrington, was a constant target of the Gawker Media blog and once famously ejected a Valleywag photographer from a party he was co-hosting simply because of the publication the photographer worked for. Not long before that Arrington had penned a melodramatic post titled, “When Will We Have Our First Valleywag Suicide?” arguing that giving the stars of Silicon Valley the same cutting treatment usually reserved for their celluloid brethren was uncalled for. “So how long will it be before Valleywag drives someone in our community to suicide?” the TechCrunch editor wrote. “My fear is that it isn’t a matter of if it will happen, but when.”
In a phone conversation with Thomas yesterday I reminded him of this post. “You know it’s interesting,” he said. “In their write up about me leaving they didn’t report on anyone killing themselves.”
Thomas, 37, has accepted a job as managing editor for NBC Bay Area and his last day at Gawker is next Friday. He signed onto Valleywag mid-2007, replacing Gawker founder Nick Denton, who had taken over the site after firing its previous editor.
Though Thomas wouldn’t give me any details on his new gig or how it came about, we discussed his tenure at Valleywag and how he and others under the Gawker masthead brought a skeptical, unflinching eye to an industry ripe for being disillusioned. As TechCrunch had noted, those who went to the valley were not accustomed to having their personal lives run through the tabloid shredder.
“Silicon Valley has long styled themselves as the new celebrities,” Thomas said. “But they think they are unlike a Hollywood actor or a New York media prince. They think they’re above the fray. They want to be famous, but only in ways they can control — probably like anyone else in the public eye. But there’s sort of this delusion in the valley that you can work on a product that touches hundreds of millions of people’s lives and then remain completely detached from their interest in you. And it’s just not realistic, it’s a fantasy to think that you’re going to start something like Google or Twitter and people aren’t going to want to know who you are and what your ideas are and what your intentions are for them.”
But he said that my thesis that Valleywag had somehow invented this kind of coverage was “ahistorical,” pointing to a site he had written for in the ’90s called Suck.com that had taken on people in the industry back then and continued to do so until its folding during the dot com bust. Still, he acknowledged that the blog, under his editorship, had honed its coverage so that he was “asking the questions that no one else was asking.” In a way, he said, the fact that PR companies and official spokespersons learned to avoid him like the plague was a blessing, because then he didn’t have to waste any time to get the “official lie.” Instead, Valleywag, like most Gawker blogs, made constant use of “tipsters,” regularly leaking memos, emails and the vitriol harbored by disgruntled valley employees.
Thomas said he enjoyed this kind of work because it derailed the self-serving narrative of most tech startups that claim they’re trying to change the world. “I will say that people in Silicon Valley really do want to change the world, but they want to change the world from one in which they’re poor to one in which they’re rich. They’ll try to say they’re trying to save the planet or change the world of media, or what have you, but people don’t come to Silicon Valley because they want to live in poverty knowing they contributed to the betterment of humanity. People come to Silicon Valley because they think they can do that and make a bundle at the same time. So you have the same emotions, the same greed, the same foibles that any other set of human beings have, perhaps made all the more interesting because these people are, let’s face it, people who are socially awkward, who are somewhat outcasts and view technology and the internet as sort of retreats from the ordinary demands that other human beings have to face day to day.”
Though Valleywag was launched as its own separate blog, it was recently rolled into the main Gawker site after Nick Denton announced that he wanted the Manhattan media blog to develop a more national focus (Valleywag’s new content still flows through the original URL as well). Thomas told me that he had wondered about this move initially, but that writing for Gawker’s much larger audience had increased his exposure in ways that only improved his reporting, in that he could write articles that were “consequently more important.” He noted that since joining the flagship blog its traffic has increased significantly.
Replacing Thomas is Gawker’s current night editor, Ryan Tate, who previously worked with Thomas when they were both journalists at Business 2.0. Thomas has always been a fan of his colleague’s work — he told me a humorous story in which both he and Denton coincidentally offered Tate a job at the exact same time — and that knowing that he would take over made him feel better about leaving Valleywag.
I asked Thomas about the enemies he has made over the years and whether he thought that ill will would carry on into his next career. But he replied that he had no enemies, that he was able to maintain proper emotional distance in such a way so that his personal views on these people wouldn’t compromise his writing.
“What I think people fundamentally misunderstood about my career at Valleywag is that I’m not angry at people,” he said. “I’m sad, I’m disappointed. They really could do so much better with their lives. And they have these kind of tragic flaws, like Greek heroes, and that’s the root of what makes a good story. Telling the stories the way that the valley people would like you to tell them — that they’re going from success to success, the brilliant brain flash, the inevitable happy ending — that’s not real. It’s not interesting. It’s at once false and boring. To tell the story with the raw truth is the right thing to do, and I make no apologies for it.”
And so what if Gawker, as it tends to do, decides to throw him through the tabloid shredder after his departure?
“You know, I’m sure if they do, I’ll richly deserve it.”
