Gordon's Republic

Gordon Macmillan

Gawker is the blog that started back in 2002 by the former Financial Times journalist, Nick Denton. It started out as a blog about New York, then became a sort of media land blog/Conde Nast insider blog where you could read things like what Anna Wintour was wearing/eating/firing, before morphing more into a celebrity gossip column that would at times rival the New York Post's Page Six.

This week a little US literary magazine n+1 spent thousands of words dissecting Gawker and possibly sparking the departure of the blog's managing editor Choire Sicha and editor Emily Gould.

The thesis of the piece in n+1 magazine is that Gawker was too often beyond the pale and it "had always sold itself as mean but it now became, actually, very mean". It was "taking the form but lacking the content of tabloid magazines and websites… co-editors besieged essentially private people".

It cites a number of lows including one where it exposed a writer at the once great Village Voice for fabricating parts of a cover article and for weeks ran stories on the guy with headlines like 'Putting Nick Sylvester on Suicide Watch' and 'Sylvester Continues Picking Up the Pieces'.

n+1 went on to make the point, as illustrated, that the status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully.

Anyway, the editors left (a story covered by the New York Times as well), but denied it was because of the magazine articles that say you are mean (but smart) when this is what you have made your name so far doing, but more because, well, blogging, is low paid and Gawker is about poking fun at people (among other things) who work at Conde Nast, which is where all the Gawkerettes really want to work anyway so that they too can see up close and personal what it is that Anna Wintour is wearing.

Gould told WWD: "Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over," she said. "I would love it if it just fell off the face of the earth....I don't want to say the meanest thing or the most shocking thing possible anymore, because it gets so old and so soul-killing. There is stuff I really care about. I'm not interested in tearing it down as much as describing it."

To illustrate the low paid thing, Nick Denton had another brilliant idea this week. Most Gawker bloggers were paid a flat rate of $12 per post for 12 posts a day (with bonuses), but now he is looking at a pay-for-performance system. Ouch. I know online can be viewed as a sweat shop, but still. The piece says Denton has always tracked the page views of each individual Gawker Media writer, whoever generates the most page views becomes his favourite. If each writer was only as valuable as the page views he drew, then why shouldn’t Denton pay him accordingly?

Balk, the site's primary troublemaker, quickly posted an item on Gawker about this change with the slug “Like Rain on Your Wedding Day, Except for Instead of Rain It’s Knives.” Denton wasn't amused. "Your item makes the argument for performance pay even stronger,” he responded in the post’s comments. “This awesomely self-indulgent post -- of interest to you, me, and you, and me -- will struggle to get 1,000 views. Which, under the new and improved pay system, Balk, will not even buy you a minute on your bourbon drip.” (Balk gave notice two weeks later.)"

It's been an interesting ride for Denton who having helped build dotcom networking event First Tuesday has gone on to build a bonafide new media publishing firm, racking up serious amounts of page impressions.

It isn't just Gawker now, he has a number of sites: Fleshbot (porn); Jalopnik (cars); Gizmodo (gadgets); and Kotaku (games).

Gawker has always traded on sarcasm and being New York bitchy:

"we hear that Spitzer's press minder who was handling the reporters is kind of an idiot!. After Nick Paumgarten's New Yorker profile was already in edits, Spitzer's guy was asking him, "What's going to be in the piece?" That's just sad. Real political operations -- see Team Clinton -- don't have to ask, because they already know".

I'm not entirely sure if Gawker is written by people who really know (my italics) either (they say things like this, "I don’t even really want to be a writer, but I feel like I don’t have a choice. It's all I’ve ever known how to do", which you have to be well under 30 to get away with, but its mostly fun if you like your blogs served that way, and a lot of people do) and really it is easy to appear as you know on blogs, which don't generally require any critical restraint.

This is what the exhaustive n+1 piece is about, which itself followed a 6,000 word (count 'em) piece on Gawker back in October in New York Magazine (Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the Age of Insolence), which mostly wrote it off as a place of sarcastic cheap shots and gleefully predicted its demise chiefly on the basis that Gawker is nowhere near as successful as some of Denton's other blogs (Gizmodo and Kotaku).

"The past couple of years, Gawker has expanded its mission to include celebrity gossip, sacrificing some of its insider voice in the process, but on a most basic level, it remains a blog about being a writer in New York, with all the competition, envy, and self-hate that goes along with the insecurity of that position."

It wasn't exactly a watertight analysis considering that the rest of the article was spent talking about how depressed print journalists were becoming with their disappearing pages and pointing out that Gawker was racking up 10m page impressions a month, which are nice numbers and in this moment of social media frenzy don't suggest a decline anytime soon.