stories as Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff's attempt to detain a Wall Street Journal reporter, claiming that reporters were sitting on this story. Denton also recruited national magazine writer Paul Boutin to post a daily "Silicon Valley Users Guide" feature on local customs, politics and places, though Boutin subsequently dropped the column when he briefly rejoined Wired. In July 2007, Owen Thomas, formerly Business 2.0's online editor, with a career that stretched from Suck.com and Wired to Time and the Red Herring, assumed the role of managing editor. He added several staff members and contributors, "very special correspondent" Paul Boutin, associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West. In September 2007, Boutin published a list of 40 companies to be showcased by rival publication TechCrunch at a conference, again suggesting that reporters and bloggers were keeping the list—on display at the conference site—from their readers to gain favor with TechCrunch and the companies. Valleywag posted a link to its automated traffic statistics on its front page. In March 2008, these stats showed an average of 131,000 visits and 189,000 pageviews per day, with 2 million visits and 3 million pageviews in December. It was one of the top 100 technology news sites, according to Techmeme. Mainstream technology reporters John Markoff, Walt Mossberg and David Pogue acknowledged that they read the site regularly, and had their emails to Valleywag published on the site. In fall 2008, associate editors Nicholas Carlson and Jackson West and reporter Melissa Gira Grant were laid off, leaving Owen Thomas and Paul Boutin to run the site. This was part of an overall restructuring by Gawker Media, described in a memo by Nick Denton as shifting resources to the most commercially successful Gawker sites, away from the focus on increasing traffic, in view of the 2008 credit crisis. On November 12, Nick Denton informed Owen Thomas that Valleywag would be folded, laying off Paul Boutin, with Thomas taking over a column on its parent site Gawker. In April 2013, Valleywag was resurrected under the editorship of Sam Biddle. Criticism and controversy Critics of Nick Denton argue that Valleywag was created in order to give himself leverage over Silicon Valley companies. The website made several high-profile mistakes in reporting stories. Editor Nick Denton twice misreported the identity of the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, before Daniel Lyons was outed as the true author. Stating he "ought to have