Two excellent newsletters I read this week

Matt Levine at Bloomberg:

If you can lose all your money and go into debt based on your colleagues’ bad decisions, then … look, that can work, that’s conventionally called a “partnership,” but it tends to rely on deep trust among partners backed up by a collaborative environment, transparent information sharing and a careful selection process for partners. “We didn’t hire each other” is, unbelievably, one of the phrases in the Vision Fund’s word cloud: not a great sign! If your colleagues are actively hiding deals from you, then why would you trust them with your net worth?

Oh one last cultural point from that Vision Fund article is this absolutely Wambsgans first paragraph:

Flying over Europe in a private jet last year, Rajeev Misra took his shoes off and propped his bare feet on the knee of a top executive of FIFA, soccer’s governing body. The executive froze while Mr. Misra, head of SoftBank Group Corp.’s $100 billion Vision Fund, chatted about ways to make more money off the streaming rights for the organization’s tournaments.

The Journal put that at the beginning of their article but I am mentioning it at the end here because there is really nothing to say after that.

Will Leitch's newsletter:

It was the first time my father had ever recommended a job to me, had ever even implied he didn’t think things were going well out in New York, and it was deeply alarming: They’re scared it’s not going to work out for me. And why wouldn’t they be? I was 29 years old, working thankless jobs for no money in the most expensive city in the country, and the only thing I was excited about was working for hours every day for free on a website I did with my friends that had no readers. If my parents were this concerned, surely, everyone was. Will had all this promise. We loved that he always dreamed big. But he’s almost 30 years old now. It’s probably time for him to start getting serious about his life. It was becoming increasingly clear they weren’t wrong. How much longer could I continue to kid myself? (I politely declined Dad’s invitation and have never brought it up again until right now.)

...

And then the site took off. You know what happened with the site after that. In many ways, I’m fortunate I had failed so much before Deadspin happened: I knew quickly that this was as close as I was going to get to a big break, and therefore I was mature and determined enough to make sure I didn’t screw it up. (If I had been 22 or so, I wouldn’t have understood how rare such opportunities are.) I dedicated my entire life to Deadspin.

"Behind Peter Thiel's Plan To Destroy Gawker"

Forbes:

It gets weirder. According to multiple sources familiar with Harder’s arrangement, he never had any direct contact with Thiel. And, these sources claim, Harder didn’t even know who was funding the litigation until FORBES broke the news in May.

...

Ayyadurai . . . says no lawyer would take his case–until he presented it to Harder. Ayyadurai won’t discuss his arrangement with Harder, but denies that any third party is paying his bills. “To the best of my knowledge, I’m not seeing any money in my account coming from Peter Thiel,” he says.

...

While Harder’s firm publicly represents those two clients, FORBES has found at least two other cases–Gawker is currently a defendant in at least a dozen lawsuits–in which Harder Mirell has worked quietly behind the scenes. One involves soliciting plaintiffs in cases that, contrary to Thiel’s claims that he’s defending those who have been wronged by the site, have nothing to do with its journalism.

Link roundup

1. "On Wednesday, University of Florida journalism professor Mike Foley was called to the stand in a St. Petersburg, Fla. courtroom to testify for the plaintiff, Terry Bollea (better known by his “Hulk Hogan” stage name) against Gawker."

Foley, who is being paid $350/hr for his expert testimony, said that he believed there was "no question" that Gawker violated the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics

...

The SPJ is tired of attorneys treating it like it is.

"In 2009, we added an explicit disclaimer saying that it was not legally enforceable. It doesn’t establish a standard of care for journalists,"

2. "Las Vegas Utilities Really Don’t Want the Strip to Go Solar"

Together, the casinos’ 15 properties account for 7 percent of NV Energy’s electricity sales, and if that income were lost, the utility says, its remaining customers would have to endure significant rate hikes. As a result, the public utility commission (PUC) of Nevada is demanding resorts pay tens of millions of dollars to leave NV Energy’s services

3. John Batman was one of the founders of Melbourne.

"the gap between the revenues of Gawker Media and the revenues of Vox Media, the gap is around $20 million a year"

CNY:

"There’s a thing called the Gawker tax which represents the cost of selling these brands that any moment can blow up, they can blow up because of internal dissension, they can blow up because of a story that goes wrong, and they call it the Gawker tax.
...
"Now, I don’t want to close that gap and I don’t want to become Vox Media, but the fact of the matter is that it is really hard to sell Gawker, Gawker.com in particular, because Gawker.com likes to pick fights with pretty much everybody. That's just the reality,"

"I spent some time thinking about stories I would happily, or at least guiltily-happily, read about David Geithner and this escort, if the stories happened to be true."

"This is in order of what I would be most comfortable reading to least comfortable:"

"'I was targeted by a blogger via Jezebel.com who would like to see me out of business. The reason? I refused to tattoo her neck'"

The artist responds. (The Jezebel post has 400k page views.)

Joel Johnson, formerly of Gawker Media, on Gawker Media: "managed by [Nick] Denton, who is a comically inept product visionary, manager, and technical mind"

Commenting on the recent unionization of Gawker editorial staff:

Hence, a ceaseless paranoia that encourages and rewards employees who gossip to him about their peers, or perpetuates cynical (and cyclical!) editorial strategies that manifest in sites like Valleywag, which existed entirely as a lever to be used in transactions with Valley companies. (“I am no longer feared when I walk into Silicon Valley boardrooms” was the response I was given when attempting to shut down Valleywag last year.) It’s this paranoia that prompts the emotionally fueled dismissals of employees when they “seem stressed.”

Scandal archaeology

Gawker:

What makes these photos unusual is that they’re impossible to find on the Internet. There is no trace of them or the accompanying story on Star’s current website, and the magazine doesn’t sell any back issues. Google Images turns up nothing. A few months ago, however, an (apparently rare) copy of the April 11, 2000 issue of Star surfaced on eBay. So we bought it.

Wow, Gawker really did lose Mercedes advertising $ due to GamerGate-mocking Tweets:

Transparent and documented though it was, the obsessive campaign worked. Mercedes-Benz—listed on the site as a former partner, and therefore a target—briefly paused its ads on a network that serves ads to Gawker. I've been told that we've lost thousands of dollars already, and could potentially lose thousands more, if not millions. Consequently, the editorial director of Gawker Media, Joel Johnson, took to the front page of Gawker to clarify that Sam Biddle does not want to bully anyone, and that Gawker Media as a company and institution is not pro-bullying. (Let's note here that the admitted goal of our Gamergate trolls is not to eke an apology out of Sam, or the company, but to literally put us out of business entirely.)

(Compare.)

Gawker Media's ongoing experiment with competing subsites--io9 already had a toy subsite called Toybox, and now Gizmodo has a toy subsite called Toyland.

Gawker's recurring restaurant series

Gawker has an ongoing series of restaurant reviews by Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak. From their review of the United Nations Dining Room:

Rich: I realized I had a knife in my bag on the way to the United Nations. It's a pocket knife—a nice one—and while I've never used it (I've never had to), I did not want to give it up. But I knew we'd be searched. I also worried about leaving it in the cab and having someone pick it up and kill someone with it. That knife is safer on me than not, but I'm not safe with it. 

I spent my last few minutes in the cab quietly regarding my knife and decided to place it in the trash underneath some other trash in the hope that when we were done, I could go back and retrieve my beloved knife that I've never used. 

Caity: Here is what I thought as I watched you (from across the street) root around in a trashcan: Why did Rich just walk over to that trashcan and start digging in it? Is he looking for cans to recycle for money? Is he looking for food? I bet Rich wouldn't want me to watch him do this. :(

Lox at The Jewish Museum:

The sandwich was kind of...hard. It was cute when you asked me, while picking at my plate (which, for the record, I invited you to do), "Got any more loose onions?" mostly because it reminded me of a time that a woman asked me, "Got any spare pants?" when I was in a parking lot of a North Philly mini-mart. "Got any more loose onions?" was my favorite part of my sandwich. 

Caity: The most confusing part of the sandwich for me was when you launched into that entertaining story about spare pants, which bore no evident relation to anything we were talking about or doing. I kept waiting for the detail that would make it all fall into place. Finally I just had to ask, "Why did you tell that story?" ("Because of the loose onions!" Oh, OK.)

Grand Central's Campbell Apartment:

Caity: It is an odd feeling to be completely alone in a restaurant. No other patrons, which is understandable for a bar at 2 pm on a Tuesday, but also: No employees. 100% alone. 

Rich: I could have taken off my offending pants and offended no one besides you. 

Caity: It felt like, if we ever tried to go back, all we'd find would be a burnt out, boarded-up elegant office/jail. "That place? Burned down 50 years ago this week." This would also explain our initial ghostly interaction with the silent, nodding waiter.

The Statue of Liberty's Crown Cafe:

Rich: We wolfed down our food and immediately rushed...back into a line. 

Caity: The line for the return ferry was EVEN MORE COMICALLY LONG than the line to get out there in the first place. It stretched for 9000 city blocks, culminating in a near perfect circle. 

Rich: A circle of hell.

The Armani Store:

Caity: When our team of three waiters brought out your soup, Lucio put down your bowl—empty but for a minuscule portion of asparagus—and exclaimed, "Here's the soup!" Then we all laughed (in Italian) and one of his assistants poured it in. 

He felt comfortable joking with us because he could tell we were low-class. It was like the scene in Lady and the Tramp when the restaurateur gives them a plate of spaghetti at a romantic table for two. "It is a funny joke to pretend you are people!" Lucio's eyes laughed.