FROM THE 'VALLEY' TO THE 'ALLEY'

By: Ellen Liburt Former Merc News Columnist Writes For N.Y. Post

Starting today, New Yorkers will be able to read Chris Nolan's Silicon Valley column in the New York Post every week.

The tabloid scooped up the former San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News columnist after she parted ways with that paper last month, having filed a complaint against it with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and a grievance with The Newspaper Guild.

?She's in San Francisco; we're obviously in New York, but the Internet community is a bicoastal one,? said Post Business Editor Jon Auerbach. ?She does a great job in covering the people behind the Internet and Silicon Valley, and we cover the Internet and New York's Silicon Alley.?

He added that while the column Nolan wrote for the Mercury News was very local, the one for the Post will be geared to a more national audience. The new column appears under the banner ?Silicon City - From the Valley to the Alley.?

?There is a school of thought out here that big media headquartered in New York City is less relevant than stuff on the Internet,? Nolan told E&P Interactive by phone from San Francisco, ?and a feeling among a lot of people that maybe it's not the center of the universe anymore. And this suspicion that there's more going on in Seattle than on the island of Manhattan is taking root.?

But Nolan thinks she can bridge the gap between the two worlds. ?I have a very New York sensibility,? said Nolan, who is 40. ?I went to Barnard [College], and I spent most of my time in and around big media. I've lived all my life on the East Coast until three years ago.

?And I think that's part of the reason the Post thinks a column like mine is going to add to what they can offer their readers,? she said. ?Certainly I have spent a lot of time explaining Silicon Valley to people on the East Coast.?

Nolan's ?Talk Is Cheap? column at the Mercury News was suspended - and she was reassigned to a lower-paying job covering local news - after The Wall Street Journal revealed in July that she had made money by investing in a local Internet company's initial public offering at the initial offering price through the company's CEO, a longtime friend. Nolan said she had never had any intention of covering the company in her column because of that friendship, and that she had informed her editors of the investment in March.

Nolan's attorney, Terry Gross of San Francisco law firm Gross & Belsky, said it may be more than six months before the EEOC is able to investigate Nolan's complaint, which alleges sexual discrimination, retaliatory firing, and unequal pay; while her grievance with the guild is scheduled for a hearing in May.

Nolan's former bosses at the Mercury News have declined to comment on her complaints.

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Ellen Liburt (ellenl@mediainfo.com) is a reporter for Editor & Publisher magazine.




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