Gawker

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 2:14pm on Monday, August 10th, 2009

Gabriel Snyder wrote at Gawker on August 3, 2009 that newspapers are busy blaming blogs for the bad judgment of newspaper editors:

"Blogs are killing newspapers. But it's not by mindlessly cutting and pasting from newspaper web sites. Gawker would go out of business if that's all we did.

The bigger threat is that blogs say the things that hidebound newspaper editors are too afraid to let their reporters write."

The full story:
http://gawker.com/5328840/the-time-gawker-put-the-washington-post-out-of-business

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:35pm on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Richard Rushfield has left the Los Angeles Times to join Gawker as its West Coast editor.

Gawker editor Gabe Snyder wrote:

"Ever since Defamer was merged into Gawker earlier this year, I've been looking for the right person to hire in L.A., so I'm pleased to announce someone who was worth the wait: Richard Rushfield is joining Gawker as its new West Coast Editor. From his Venice bungalow he'll proudly fly the Defamer flag as well as pitch in with charting the general editorial direction of the site.

Richard joins us from the Los Angeles Times where he's been the Entertainment Editor of their web site since 2005. While that paper has had its fair share of internal changes — and lots of meetings, I'm told — Richard put together one of its true bright points, overseeing a staff of writers and reporters who work primarily for latimes.com and attack the kinds of stories that are as relevant to industry insiders as they are entertaining and insightful to a national audience."

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 11:27pm on Friday, July 10th, 2009

The White House held an "off the record" Fourth of July BBC for the White House press corps, Gawker reported on July 9, 2009:

"Reporters from roughly 30 television networks, newspapers, magazines, and web sites celebrated the Fourth of July with Barack Obama at the White House last weekend. Why didn't you know that? Because they were sworn to secrecy."

The full story:
http://gawker.com/5311055/white-house-press-corps-spent-the-fourth-of-july-hanging-out-with-obama-off-the-record

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 12:29pm on Friday, May 29th, 2009

Gawker plans to pay its bills by deceiving readers, Zachary M. Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on May 27, 2009:

"Expect Gawker Media’s latest advertising innovation to draw criticism, if not blood, when it sees daylight today. The blogging empire is temporarily welcoming a new site into its fold that’s written and paid for by HBO to promote the network’s noir vampire drama, True Blood. And the word “advertisement” won’t appear anywhere in the project’s vicinity.

Entries from the blog, BloodCopy, will appear as cross-posts in the mix of Gawker Media’s eight verticals, which include Gizmodo, Kotaku, and the flagship. They’ll be set off by a border and labeled as BloodCopy posts but otherwise indistinguishable from editorial content — except that the blog is written by an undead, bloodsucking ghoul.

“With vampires, we thought we could be a little looser with the disclosure and create some disbelief,” Chris Batty, Gawker’s vice president of sales and marketing, told me yesterday, dismissing critics of the advertorial as “humorless.” He also made a bold prediction that surprised me so much I made sure to confirm I’d heard correctly: “If we’re around in three or four years,” Batty said, “the majority of our advertising revenue will be in sponsored posts like this.”

Now, I’ll let others hash out the very-legitimate ethical questions this all raises. Gawker managing editor Gabriel Snyder, echoing a 2007 incident, has already denounced the ad sale: “What’s advertising should be called advertising and what’s edit should be called edit. It hurts both to blur the distinction.” But that’s an easy angle compared to what’s also going on here, which is the fruition of a long-held belief that advertising should act more like content."