The Sunday New York Times has a feature on Nick Denton and his Gawker Media blog “empire,” a compliment he doesn’t particularly like. For the man said to have taken blogging mainstream, Denton is pretty skeptical:
“The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe,” he said. “They want to believe there’s going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed.”
The company is profitable; estimating $750,000 in revenue each year, “it’s a nice little business” although no one will get rich off it. The fact that the company groups its blogs together also makes advertisers more willing to pony up, but leaves some indie bloggers cold:
Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers. …
The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Mr. Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. “These people are hirelings,” he said. “What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce.”
Yeah, and Denton has never pretended otherwise. For all the complaining about the peanuts Gawker pays its editors, I still would love to work for Gawker as editor of its theoretical Seattle tech gossip blog, tentatively titled “Needler.” For that to work, however, I’d probably have to get something published as a freelancer. The classic “you don’t have enough blog editing experience to become a blog editor” conundrum so many idealistic teens have faced…
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.