http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/technology/gossip-in-silicon-valley-and-the-digital-age.html 2016-10-16 11:14:04 In Silicon Valley, Gossip, Anger and Revenge Valleywag’s posts about Peter Thiel raised his ire, and he financed a lawsuit against its parent, Gawker Media. === SAN FRANCISCO — 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. Valleywag 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 co-founder Most notoriously, at least in retrospect, the tech gossip blog said in late 2007 that Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was an early and significant investor in Facebook, Outing famous people has a long and not particularly respectable history, but Valleywag said it was celebrating Mr. 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 Mr. Thiel’s ire. He The revelation of “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. “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 Mr. Thiel — pushed back. “We should not be surprised that they act like entitled industrialists out here, because they are,” Mr. 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 Nick Denton, the Gawker founder, stepping in to write the blog at one point. Its most influential years were in the beginning, especially under Mr. 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. “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.’” John Cook, executive editor of Gawker Media, who helped put Valleywag to rest last year, said the site “didn’t play the access game.” Mr. 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 Mr. Thiel, taking action against Gawker may be a win. Dan Lyons, an author who was briefly a Valleywag writer, said what Mr. 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, wrote Mr. Adams wrote approvingly of Mr. Thiel, “I assume he is acting out of a combination of revenge and a desire to make the world a better place.” Without this 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 the Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, an occasional Valleywag target, said simply about the site and this week’s events, “I don’t care about any of those people.” The news about Mr. Thiel funding the suit against Gawker broke 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. Mr. Thiel, as it happens, is a Facebook board member. Facebook declined to comment on Mr. Thiel. Mr. Thomas, who is himself gay, argues that Valleywag was not really outing Mr. 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 Mr. Thiel for being “the smartest V.C. in the world,” it took a more disparaging view as well. In one post about Mr. Thiel’s claims of hiring only the best to work at his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, Mr. Thomas wrote, “Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés 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.” Mr. Thiel returned the favor, “It scares everybody,” he said in a 2009 interview with Pe Hub, a