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A Superflack Scorned

Hamilton Nolan · 06/20/08 03:22PM

Earlier this week we gave you a brief history of Rob Shuter, the shameless former celebrity flack whose various transgressions have reduced him to editing OK! Magazine. That post brought back some memories for Michael Lucas, famous gay porn performer and impresario (pictured, on the left). According to Lucas, he once snubbed Shuter's request for love, which sparked a neverending campaign by the uberflack to exact his revenge! Worst of all, Lucas says, Shuter even used poor supermodel Naomi Campbell for his own nefarious ends. Lucas' full, telling letter is below.

Wired Ran Rehashed Article In Its Inaugural Issue

Hamilton Nolan · 06/19/08 12:02PM

Wired magazine is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, with much reflection and self-congratulation. But one strange thing: in its very first issue in 1993, Wired ran an article that had already run under a different byline in a different magazine. A tipster provides evidence that an article in that issue about Japanese computer hackers by Karl Taro Greenfeld ran almost verbatim a year earlier-under a different byline-in Tokyo Journal. Furthermore, Greenfeld ran another article on the same subject in the LA Times Magazine, in which he describes one computer hacker identically to how he had described a different computer hacker in the Wired piece. Something seriously weird is going on here. [UPDATE: We now have a note from Karl Taro Greenfeld, saying that he is the author of all the pieces in question, and explaining the byline discrepancy, which is posted below. An explanation of what happened here-and key portions of all the stories in question-after the jump].

Julia Allison's post-Star Plans: They're Pink!

Sheila · 06/18/08 03:07PM

Surely you've been wondering how Carrie Bradshaw-wannabe Julia Allison was gonna spin losing her $100,000 job as Star magazine's talking head. Our managing ed Nick Denton caught her on the IM for an interview. Future plans? A new website, NonSociety. (The catchphrase: "Live different;" and it's designed in pink—her favorite color!) She's starting a web show/business with her two bestfriends, "handbag designer" Mary Rambin and techball Megan Asha. (They have investment money!) Oh, and there's still that reality show. Click for the somewhat combative interview, including this classic exchange: "Not that you would understand what a real conversation is like, anyway." "This isn't a conversation, it's an interview."

Project Runway Demands Magazine Tribute

Nick Denton · 06/10/08 01:03PM

It has become conventional wisdom that print is struggling to renew its readership and that cost-effective reality programming is the future of television. But just how much has the balance of media power shifted? Here's one anecdote which says it all. Bravo's annual contest for aspiring fashion designers-Project Runway-has become so powerful that magazine titles such as Marie Claire and Bazaar are expected actually to pay for the privilege of attaching their names.

Photos from Randi Zuckerberg's wedding

Owen Thomas · 06/04/08 04:00PM

Darlings, everyone who's anyone is flying to a Caribbean island to get married. Larry Page and Lucy Southworth did the deed on some spit of sand called Necker Island. Randi Zuckerberg? The Facebooker took over something like the entire island of Jamaica to get hitched to venture-capital associate Brent Tworetzky. Or just Runaway Bay — our sources can't get that part entirely straight. But we did get a batch of photos from the wedding. A destination wedding in Jamaica? Expensive. Making your younger brother, who's ostensibly your boss and worth $4 billion on paper, dress in a turquoise vest and an ill-fitting tuxedo shirt? Priceless. The photos:

Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan private pics exposed by Yahoo hack

Owen Thomas · 06/03/08 02:00AM

Want to see Paris Hilton's MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan's? Don't worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to "data portability," a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace. Byron Ng, a Canadian computer technician with a knack for finding Web security holes, has discovered that Yahoo's integration with MySpace makes it easy to view photos for any profile. These images, which Ng obtained from Hilton's and Lohan's profiles, speak to the danger Yahoo and MySpace's lax data-sharing habits pose:

YouTube star Jill Hanner on hawking Coors Light

Jackson West · 06/02/08 05:20PM

Everyone from the New York Times to Silicon Alley Insider, even our older sister Gawker, were in a tizzy last week over a series of ads for Coors Light produced for the world's best platform for delivering booze advertising to minors, YouTube. The publicity even managed to get one of the paid response videos pulled from YouTube by the sponsor. But the companies that commissioned and produced the spot, TubeMogul and For Your Imagination respectively, missed at least one big clue that Jill Hanner might not be on the Coors Light bandwagon.

Director Bill Levesque and producer Brett Bonthron on "Weekend King"

Jackson West · 05/30/08 07:00PM

Weekend King, the low-budget feature written and directed by Microsoft's Bill Levesque and produced by his colleague Brett Bonthron, has had its run at the Victoria Theater extended for three more weeks, playing tomorrow night at 7 p.m. The film won't win any Oscars, but I can see why audiences have responded well: As a comedy of manners set in the Valley, it captures much of the anxiety amongst the legions of post-boom cube dwellers who toil on the peninsula. In an interview at Valleywag hangout Caffe Roma, Levesque and Bonthron admitted the film needed some work in post-production, but were emphatic that it be seen with an audience — joking that I should insert my own laugh track into the screener DVD they provided to mimic the experience.

Men Seeing 'Sex and the City': Why?

Pareene · 05/30/08 10:37AM

Sex and the City is the only thing happening in the world today, which made us wonder [Note: that is the only 'Sex and the City' joke I know]: what kind of dude went to see this movie? Gawker videographer Alex Goldberg lurked outside the Union Square movie theater last night and aggressively questioned all the men of the male persuasion waiting in line for the most important film event of our time. Why were they there? The answer was not always "to get laid." Though that was pretty much the answer with the straight guys. You fools! Didn't you watch the damn movie? Your ladyfriend will only have sex with you if you buy them fancy clothes and propose marriage. The whole scene looks like an amazing shitshow. "Cosmos? No, I had a metropolitan, though, and a White Russian."

Tell-All Book: Zuckerberg Set Up Facebook To Get Laid

Nick Douglas · 05/22/08 06:00AM

The author of Bringing Down The House has signed a million-dollar-plus book deal for his memoir about Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook founders, according to a tip to Gawker. In the proposal, author Ben Mezrich claims that Zuckerberg and his friend Eduardo Saverin started Facebook to get into a secret society and, of course, to get laid. The book may not be the most rigorously factual account, as Mezrich's Bringing Down The House (the basis for the Kevin Spacey film 21) was debunked by the Boston Globe as "not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word." Also, our tipster claims Mezrich's only source was Saverin, whom Zuckerberg is now suing. Here are the juiciest (and previously unreported) details from the proposal.

Wired's Reddit launches TV show: Your Week

Nicholas Carlson · 05/21/08 10:20AM

Condé Nast-owned social news aggregator Reddit will today launch a new "interactive public television and internet show," from WETA Washington, D.C. called Your Week. Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian tells us the show will feature Reddits usual topics — politics, arts, international, science, tech, social, sports, and pop culture — chosen by through reader and viewer voting. The show's theme song will be chosen through a contest on Jamglue. New Republic senior editor MIchelle Cottle and the National Review's Rich Lowry will host and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is paying the bills. It's a lot like rival social news site Digg's Internet show, Diggnation. Without the beer or the hoodies, we're guessing. Says Ohanian:

What's a Googler doing at Benchmark? Solving the VC talent crisis

Owen Thomas · 05/20/08 08:00PM

Venture capital has a talent problem. (Some wags might say the problem is a complete lack of talent, but not this one.) The difficulty: Potential hires are either too junior, and hence useless as anything but a startup-hunting associate, or too senior to be brought in as anything but a full partner, a process which is difficult and expensive. Benchmark Capital has found a clever solution. It's hired Jonathan Teo, a former Google engineering manager who played a key role in the company's international expansion, as an "investor," according to his LinkedIn profile. (A source close to the firm tells me his exact title may not be settled yet.) Teo's non-partner hire at Benchmark is an indicator of a venture-capital industry in flux — but one that seems willing to experiment. A healthy sign. (Photo via Jonathan Teo's Friendster)

Mariah Carey Wedding Pictures: $2 Million

Hamilton Nolan · 05/12/08 12:05PM

We hear that People magazine paid around $2 million (if not more) for the recent wedding pictures of Barbie-like singer Mariah Carey and younger actor Nick Cannon. People triumphed in a bidding war with OK!. This surely rates as one of the biggest paydays of Cannon's career, if not his wife's. And that figure would make their photos even pricier than the baby pictures of Nicole Richie and Christina Aguilera, though only half as valuable as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's baby shots of Shiloh. Does Mariah still move that many magazines?

Purely Random People Coming Together: The National Magazine Awards

Hamilton Nolan · 05/02/08 09:03AM

When I saw a tall, dark-haired, model-esque woman sliding through the pre-awards crowd at the National Magazine Awards in the Rose Ballroom on 60th St. last night, my canny journalistic sixth sense kicked in. "She sure doesn't look like a magazine writer," I thought. Later, she strode out on stage during the awards ceremony. It was Padma Lakshmi, supermodel. "Fiction. It can...raise fire in the loins," she purred. Half of the audience shifted in their seats. "The sharpest weapon an editor has at her disposal is her pen. (Pause). Or her tongue." It really drove home the primary question in everyone's minds: Isn't this supposed to be, like, a magazine thing? What the fuck are all these famous people doing here? And Julia Allison? An attempted explanation, and some terrible, terrible cell phone pictures to sum up the night, after the jump.

John Battelle takes $22 million in fuck-you money

Owen Thomas · 04/30/08 03:00PM

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million.

Might Murdoch Skip A Generation At Wall Street Journal?

Nick Denton · 04/28/08 03:25PM

At a farewell party last week, some Journal staffers bitched that Marcus Brauchli, the managing editor pushed out by the paper's new owners, had sold his silence for a generous severance package. "It was disgusting," one told David Carr of the New York Times. But there was some more intriguing scuttlebutt from the event. Brauchli's predecessor Paul Steiger was overheard saying that Rupert Murdoch's lieutenants were looking externally for a replacement atop the newspaper. The name Steiger mentioned: Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times' blue-eyed mergers and acquisitions correspondent.

Facebook NSFW! Julia Allison and other pics from Randi Zuckerberg's Vegas bachelorette

Owen Thomas · 04/28/08 03:20PM

Can you imagine a photo op that Julia Allison wouldn't attend? What happens in Vegas goes instantly to Valleywag, Allison knows, and so she flew to Las Vegas to attend Randi Zuckerberg's bachelorette party. Zuckerberg, whose wig-and-sunglasses disguise did not deter the Web's paparazzi, is a budding Web video star, Facebook's marketing director, and, unlike younger brother Mark, an actual Harvard graduate. In what's surely a first, Allison, the tech-obsessed TV personality, managed not to hog the camera; she's in only one of the shots. Facebook's Meagan Marks also appears sporting what looks like a freshly acquired head wound. A slip and fall on the dance floor? Our informants are investigating. In the meantime, enjoy the evidence of Zuckerberg's bacchanal. A warning: If plastic sex toys offend your coworkers, one photo may be unsuitable for office computers.

Facebook frayed by founders' feud

Owen Thomas · 04/23/08 06:20PM

Dustin Moskovitz, Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate, recently stopped speaking to him. This has made things awkward at Facebook's Palo Alto campus, as Moskovitz is the last reminder walking around that Zuckerberg was not Facebook's sole founder. The two have resumed talking, but Moskovitz, seeking to dissociate himself from his college chum's creation, had dropped the title of vice president and asked for his bio and photograph to be taken off the company's PR website. He's now taken the title of "technical lead," and is working behind the scenes on Facebook's infrastructure. (Moskovitz was not always so publicity-shy: He gladly spoke about Facebook's wireless initiatives at the CTIA conference last fall, and, in a comment left after this post was published, denies a rift and blames Valleywag for his lowered profile.) Why the reported split, after they've worked together so long?

Is an Italian hottie the reason why Vista sucks?

Owen Thomas · 04/22/08 02:20PM

In 2001, Brian Valentine, then a top Microsoft executive, was pumped about Windows XP, as a spoof infomercial shows. By the time Vista was getting ready for release, his enthusiasm had waned. The reason? Some believe he was pining for Gianna Puerini, a sales manager who had left Microsoft for Amazon.com in 2003. In July 2006, Valentine secretly signed an employment contract with Amazon.com. Microsoft did not reveal that he was leaving for Amazon.com until September 5, less than a week before he started his new job. The business rationale for hiding his departure was obvious: Valentine ran the team that was shipping its Windows Vista operating system. Losing their leader would have killed morale.

Lindsay Lohan's Facebook Page

Richard Lawson · 04/22/08 10:07AM

Our favorite cocaine-dappled redhead, actress Lindsay Lohan, has a Facebook profile! But it's undercover... She goes by the name "Lindsay Ronson," using the last name of her friend (girlfriend perhaps??), DJ Samantha Ronson. She's friends with Marc Jacobs, his ex-fiancé (and former hooker) Jason Preston, The Hills' Lauren Conrad, model Jessica Stam, random internet socialite Cory Kennedy, and a whole host of other notable idiots. It's funny to see that all these loathsome people are connected, though I guess it makes some perfect cosmic sense in a way. Though maybe they don't all get along. She's friends with a "Hiilary Duff" (a notorious enemy) and, judging by her "Wall," she and model Lauren Hastings seem to be in some sort of fight. Also, as you can see from her "Status," she's totes serious about her new sober living ("It was 430 am!!!" she offers as cryptic explanation for something), even though she's been seen hard partying all over the place. Radar has two theories about the possibly "glassy-eyed" Long Islander). Find her "Wall" after the jump, plus, a profile picture of French toast and Parliament Lights (yum!), from Radar