Rome didn’t fall in a day

The skeptics and targets of Gawker Media – notably Radar, whose launch has been mockingly hyped by Nick Denton’s flagship blog – are circling over this news:

Last month Sploid, the “anarcho-capitalist� news site that Nick Denton vowed would take on the Drudge Report, debuted with a resounding thud. Now Denton’s longtime lieutenant, Choire Sicha, who oversaw the site, is fleeing to the New York Observer. Sources say Sicha has just accepted an offer to edit the peach-hued weekly’s Transom column, Manhattan’s preeminent chronicle of the drunk and wealthy. His departure promises to be a big blow to the penny-pinching Denton, who has always had trouble holding on to talent.

It’s been hard for Denton to launch any new titles with the cachet of Gawker, Gizmodo and Wonkette, and even the lovely lush Ms. Cox (seen here with some loser) has gotten bored:

Chasing his previous success with Gawker, Defamer, and Fleshbot, Denton has spent the last year launching a series of increasingly ill-conceived (and ridiculously named) flops, including Kinja, Screenhead, Kotaku, and Gridskipper. Wonkette, which drew huge traffic and attention during last year’s election with a mixture of nihilism and anal sex jokes, has seen its traffic drop dramatically since it was more or less abandoned by editor–turned–talking head Ana Marie Cox.

You can’t blame Denton for blog triumphalism, since he’s basically dismissed the “revolution” in favor of tightly-focused, small media properties that just happen to be in blog form because that’s what the kidz like. Whatever is happening to the empire, which I continue to venerate, my offer remains open to launch the company’s Seattle gossip blog. It can’t do any worse than Sploid, right? (Via Jonathan Last.)