Valleywag was a Gawker Media blog with gossip and news about Silicon Valley personalities. It was initially launched under the direction of editor Nick Douglas in February 2006. After Douglas was fired, the blog was taken over by Owen Thomas. Thomas left in May 2009, and was replaced by Ryan Tate. Valleywag was the first to break some stories, such as the leaking of a Gene Simmons sex tape. It was criticized for broadcasting unsubstantiated and damaging gossip about people who are not in the public eye, such as a college intern who falsely called in sick to work. The blog ceased operating in February 2011, and the URL began directing to a Gawker page with a selection of technology industry-themed stories. In April 2013, Valleywag was resurrected under the editorship of Sam Biddle. In November 2015, the website was shut down again, as part of an effort to have Gawker become a politics site. Background Valleywag launched in February 2006 with editor Nick Douglas. As a college student, Douglas had edited a gossip blog called Blogebrity. In its first post, Valleywag outed the fact that Google founder Larry Page and high-ranking employee Marissa Mayer had dated for months. It shortly followed that with the revelation that Google CEO Eric Schmidt had an apparently open marriage and had joined a church (as documented on a Web page in Google's cache) with a girlfriend. The point of these articles was that the reporters and editors who covered Silicon Valley were well aware of these relationships and their potential impact on Google's stock price and brand reputation. They had tacitly agreed not to report them in order to curry favor with Google staff. Another popular early series of items pitted "famous for the Internet" tech celebrities against each other in beauty contests. In November 2006, Douglas was fired. An internal memo about the departure surfaced, suggesting Douglas had become too focused on a small group of Internet entrepreneurs who had befriended him to get press coverage. The memo also quoted an interview he gave the R.U. Sirius Show (republished on a sister web site 10 Zen Monkeys) in which Douglas had joked that one of his goals for Valleywag was to get sued. Gawker founder Nick Denton took over the editing duties until a replacement editor could be found. Douglas remained on as a part-time contributor. Under his reign, Denton broke such