While guest-editing Gawker last week, it was pretty easy to tell that something was wrong: IM conversations were quirky, people reacted in strange ways to innocuous comments, and, well, Choire said so. And so, it's no surprise that
Emily and Choire are leaving (sorta brilliantly buried in that post), but the
job posting (which contains Gawker's first acknowledgment of the
NY Mag article by linking it with an "existential crisis" -- errr) does strike a peculiar note: "It's no longer enough to take stories from the New York Times, and add a dash of snark. Gawker needs to break and develop more stories. And the new managing editor will need to hire and manage reporters, as well as bloggers. Gawker.com receives more than 10m pageviews per month. Think of Gawker less as a blog than as a full-blown news site." New York is weird.
I kinda speaks to the idea of reblogging value and/or lack there of.
Remember when they instituted the policy of not including Digg buttons on stuff that wasn't theirs?
Also, maybe it has something to do with value as a media property vs. a blogging network?
Meaning old school 'media properties' mostly create their own content (magazine articles, news stories, etc.) vs. blogging networks which in a lot of cases point individuals to interesting things other people have written/created?
There's obvious value in both but I'd imagine much richer value in owning the original properties and being able to string that property across multiple revenue streams.
That Denton guy never ceases to surprise.
"Newspapers provide no long-term job security; this is the chance to make the leap over into online journalism."
Is online journalism really that much more secure than print?
the other thing that is wrong is that it has sucked since jessica left.
also, memo to choire and denton: wonkette has been almost unreadable for a year.
oh, i guess choire already knows. memo to denton, then. he's still there, right?
i'm guessing the existential crisis comment comes from its mention in the article.
BTW, is the n+1 article scanned anywhere? I'd like to read it but don't feel like driving around to find the article in Seattle.
Rex, nyc is not weird. You simply don't understand it. Two very different things. People rip off businesses and industries all the time here and call them something new. This has been happening since the Dutch ripped off the Native Americans when they purchased the island.
Defamer and Wonkette both losing their grip in categories they owned in 2004 speaks to the shelf life of these things compared to more service-oriented bloogs.
New York is definitely weird. I can't really understand the logic of this idea of a "New" Gawker. Reporting/breaking stories seems at odds with getting paid for your pageviews. Also: Didn't Choire and Emily kind of make it clear they were leaving precisely because that sort of thing isn't happening at Gawker right now?