Personally, I loved that site. Nick was sarcastic, witty, and entertaining. I wanted my Valleywag fix every day.
A leaked internal email from Gawker executive Lockhart Steele posted at 10 Zen Monkeys seems to indicate that Nick was canned by Gawker’s management:
We let Nick Douglas go from Valleywag yesterday.
As you know, we don’€™t make moves like this lightly, so let me explain our thinking, and the lessons from it.
Gawker sites are designed to be written from an outsider perspective. That’€™s one reason we’€™re game to hire writers like Nick Douglas, who came to San Francisco last January straight from college as a near-total outsider to the web scene. But anytime a writer settles in too closely with the subjects he/she’€™s writing about, there comes the inevitable tradeoffs: favor trading, and an elevated sense of one’€™s own importance to the field at hand. Both, to some degree, ended up being the case here.
True or not – it does add an interesting element of spice to the story…