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…