Gawker’s Nick Denton: We Don’t Fact Check, We Aim For Truth Over Time. UPDATED: Gawker Bought the Exclusive on The Balloon Hoax Story
On Thursday Gawker’s Nick Denton was on a Magazine Publishers of America Magazine Innovation Summit panel titled “The Decline and Rise of Magazine Journalism.” The moderator, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, asked how Denton monitors and fact-checks the content on Gawker sites:
“We don’t,” Mr. Denton replied flatly. “We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it. We don’t have time to check it all before.”
Towards the end of the panel, Mr. Weisberg returned to {New Yorker articles editor Susan] Morrison: “How does The New Yorker stay on top of fact checking and accuracy as they try to enter into the up-to-the-minute online sphere?” he asked
“We try to edit every single thing that goes on the Web site,” said Ms. Morrison.
Mr. Denton was shocked. “Even the Twitter posts!?”
“We have Twitter posts?,” said Ms. Morrison. “I didn’t even know we were doing Twitter posts. Who tweets?”
From The Wrap we learn that Denton shamelessly rips off magazines:
Gawker Media’s chief, argued that print magazines already have a sensibility that works online, but haven’t figured out how to translate it the way sites like his have.
“At meetings at Gawker, we quite shamelessly rip off things that magazines do well,” Denton said. “We don’t sit around dissecting the New York Times.”
When exploring ideas for a new site launch, Denton added, “I go to the newsstand and look at magazines.”
He said that the editorial process Gawker and other blogs are fond of – put up a headline first, fill out the story later – is “very alien” to people who work at magazines.
“We aim to be accurate over the long term,” Denton said. “We stumble toward the truth, much like the British (tabloid) press.”
Turning to New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison, Slate.com chairman Jacob Weisberg said that unlike Gawker, which is now faced with the challenge of not morphing into the sort of journalism it often likes to ridicule, “The New Yorker model” long-form, heavily vetted, smoothed-out copy, “doesn’t work on the web.”
RELATED STORY OF THE MOMENT: Gawker bought the exclusive rights to the Balloon Hoax Story…
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4 Responses to “Gawker’s Nick Denton: We Don’t Fact Check, We Aim For Truth Over Time. UPDATED: Gawker Bought the Exclusive on The Balloon Hoax Story”
It's quite obvious: Gawker's goal is not to inform, not to report, not to analyze. Their goal is to make money, and on the internet Clicks Per Minute = Money. How do you get CPM? By publishing tabloid, flashy stories that can be anything as long as they get attention. And thus we witness the fall of informative journalism on the internet.
I don't see Gawker as anything more than a humorous, snarky gossip site. A news site? Not so much. I visit it for a laugh, not for news.
I read the New Yorker too. There's room for everyone on the Web.
“We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it. We don’t have time to check it all before.”
He and his product are garbage. They are also, despite what some “new media” bubble-brains may wish to believe, no different than the liberal media, with their sensationalism as well as routine overt liberal bias and more (“crusader journalism”). The Internet is simply another, newer media. The message is in no way fundamentally, much less remarkably, different, something overlooked (why?) by the superficially-minded and otherwise besmitten.
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