VentureBeat

We were wondering why Valleywag, the Silicon Valley gossip site some people hate and others love, wasn’t reading as witty as usual. We saw author Nick Douglas (pictured here) at Web 2.0 last week — suggesting he was back from vacation — but the site’s posts remained distant.

Now we have confirmation he is gone, with editor Nick Denton (pictured below) taking over, and posting the following:

Nick Douglas, the kid we plucked from college to launch Valleywag, will be a great journalist. And we will look stupid for letting him go. (To reach Nick Douglas, send email to popsnap at gmail dot com.) But, to helm the site, we’re now looking for someone with, ideally, some background in reporting. An old-media career, useful in the sparkling new world of blogs. Who would have thought? We’re also in the market for a junior writer, who could be anyone from purebred blogger to frustrated publicist. Expressions of interest, or leads, to denton@valleywag.com, please. Oh, yes, I forgot to say, I’m Nick Denton, and I’m standing in on Valleywag till we find a permanent replacement. This is the beat I covered at my last gig as a reporter. Okay, so I was bored running a business.

We followed up in IM with Denton, to ask for more. Denton said: “I felt the site could be more….more popular, more authoritative, more like other gawker sites such as Defamer.” Huh, we responded, hadn’t Douglas developed a strong voice? Denton continued: “Yeah, Nick’s a talented writer, and will go a long way — and I’m not saying that. But we’re not that nurturing an environment…and he’s very young. Bottom line is that Nick was doing pretty well — Alexa rank heading up, etc — but I want Valleywag to be up with our flagship sites, like Gawker, Defamer and Wonkette. There are so many good stories here.”

By the way, check out this interview with Douglas at 10 Zen Monkeys we read the weekend before last, which suggested Douglas was looking at his next move…

Word is, Wired is looking at him, for potential hire.

We’ve emailed Douglas to see if he wants to talk.

Forbes’ Erika Brown has a good summary of how Silicon Valley has turned into a mini Hollywood.

She recounts the escapades of Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founders of Yelp, the local social site for reviews of bars and restaurants, who hold parties (see pic) with inebriated young women hanging over them, including a “Yelp Elite” mixer at the San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art ending in a girls-only kissing orgy. When asked where they want to be in five years, Stoppelman responds: “Sitting on top of a pile of money … [in unison with Simmons] … surrounded by women! Yeah! [high five]”

There is the book party hosted by billionaire Larry Ellison for political pundit Arianna Huffington at his swank San Francisco pied-a-terre. Nick Douglas, writer of the valley’s gossip site, ValleyWag, attended the soiree and wrote a column about it the next day, griping about his treatment by Google co-founder Larry Page and his girlfriend. There are Valleywag’s “Hotties of Web 2.Ooh!” contests, etc, etc.

Erika concludes:

I’m reminded of a scene from Almost Famous, a movie about an aspiring reporter who writes about an up-and-coming rock band. A crusty old journalist advises his teenage protégé: “You cannot make friends with the rock stars … They’ll buy you drinks, you’ll meet girls … I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock ‘n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it … and then it just becomes an industry of cool.”

Most of the action is moving up to the city in San Francisco, leaving the more staid region to the south — the traditional “Silicon Valley” as quiet as ever.

A San Francisco private equity firm Citron Capital has made a bid to buy Ford’s Land Rover unit. We first heard this from a source, who said they’d confirmed it with someone in the upper ranks of Ford.

We’re seeing a general expansion of the Bay Area’s money mandate. First it was venture capital. Then private equity firms started moving here, or were created from scratch, like Silver Lake, and then Elevation Partners. Elevation is is buying New-York based media outfits like Forbes. Now Bay Area money is bailing out Detroit?

We’ve run this by Jonathan Tower, a Citron partner. He couldn’t say much, he said, because of confidentiality agreements, but added:

On the record, I can only reiterate firm policy that we don’t comment on any deal - pending, contemplated or otherwise — until it is signed. The folks at FoMoCo will likely state something similar about conversations with private equity firms along with a statement about there not having been made any decision to sell Land Rover or any other Ford unit other than Aston Martin.

Excepting the above, let me issue the firm’s party line and say we think highly of the Land Rover unit and feel it possesses a lot of the elements we would look for in a buyout on this scale — a legendary upmarket brand, a near-fanatical customer base and loyalty, complete focus on a core business (as opposed to johnny-come-lately entrants to the SUV market which built their reputations elsewhere), unique positioning for cross-over products, hybrid models and brand extension opportunities, and the inarguable reputation as the marque that single-handedly created the SUV/off-road category and continues to dominate it year after year.

Land Rover, we note, is one of the few units driving sales within Ford’s broader Premier Automotive Group (PAG), which is losing a lot of money ($162 million pre-tax loss in second quarter alone). So if Ford is thinking about selling Land Rover, we’re wondering if the entire PAG might be on the block?