ChasNote

I know, I know — magazines and newspapers went extinct years ago. But I still get a thrill from seeing my name in print. So thanks, Adweek for giving me a quote on Page 7 this week!

I posted an excerpt of this story earlier in the week.

From Adweek:

“Gawker, Federated Media, Digg and others are lending a hand with brands looking to fit into their environments without being relegated to the sidelines with run-of-the-mill banner ads. The increased leeway these publishers have in crafting messages centers on the belief that they’ll resonate better than if an ‘outsider’ — whether agency or brand — tried to do it on their own.

“In many ways, the publishers are trying to pull off the same trick as magazines such as Vogue or Wired: making ads a seamless part of the content experience. The difference, publishers say, is that crafting a print ad that adheres to the style and tone of a magazine is easier for an agency to do than getting the vibe of a tight-knit community.”

Gawker media shuts down ValleyWag, according to CNET.

“A recession seems like a great time to be running a gossip blog about the tech business, given all the juicy photos of sad, laid-off employees and rumors of badly-behaved CEOs mismanaging their companies that inevitably fly around. But the reason for Valleywag’s shutdown was Denton’s notoriously doom-and-gloom vision of the future — Internet ad spending will decline a full 40 percent, he predicts — and Valleywag was one of the company’s underperforming titles.”

Sure, you guys were trouble makers that played fast and loose with the facts, but I’ll miss you. As a final tribute, a Battelle Salute from the team at ChasNote.

Photo: Friend of FM Marcia Simmons captured by ValleyWag photographer at Conversational Marketing Summit after-party, September 2007.

From Adweek’s coverage of a panel at Ogilvy’s Verge conference. Outgoing Facebook chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta defended the company’s Beacon advertising concept, while Gawker’s Nick Denton slapped back:

“Gawker media publisher Nick Denton said he believes the ‘innovation’ in social media ad models is mostly a result of their failure as media properties. Even MySpace gets higher click rates than Facebook display units, he noted.”

FM’s Battelle disagreed:

“Not all ads on Facebook perform poorly, though. John Battelle, founder of Federated Media, said Facebook applications like Graffiti Wall are running ad campaigns for companies like Dell that are performing well by all metrics. ‘There’s no engagement in ad networks,’ he said. ‘We haven’t yet figured that out yet, and I think social media will.’”

From NY Times:

“In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.”

More interesting to me is why:

“Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another. ‘It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,’ Ms. Gould said. ‘You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.’”

Here, for example, is the image that usually accompanies coverage of rumors related to FM — FM’s founder and CEO, John Battelle, giving the Battelle Salute, taken sometime in the late 1990s: