By TOM ZELLER Jr.
DON'T ask Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media and its growing list
of popular Web logs, about his empire. "People come up to me as if
it's witty and say, 'How is the empire going?' " Mr. Denton said,
"which is pretty pathetic."
Don't ask him about his business plan, either. He says he never had
one. The only reason he formed the company, he said, was to make his
network of blogs -- which includes Gawker, the flagship chronicle of
Manhattan news and gossip; Fleshbot, the thinking person's diary of
smut; and about 10 other titles -- more attractive to advertisers.
"It doesn't help with readers," he said. "It's actually a
disadvantage, because it looks corporate."
At a time when media conferences like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks
ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares,
as it did on its May 2 cover, that "Blogs Will Change Your Business,"
Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much
better at tearing things down -- people, careers, brands -- than it is
at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it
this way: "Give me a break."
"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."
For all of the stiff-arming and disdain that Mr. Denton brings to the
discussion of this nonrevolution, however, there is no question that
he and his team are trying to turn the online diarist's form --
ephemeral, fast-paced and scathingly opinionated -- into a viable, if
not lucrative, enterprise. Big advertisers like Audi, Nike and General
Electric have all vied for eyeballs on Gawker's blogs, which
Mr. Denton describes as sexy, irreverent, a tad elitist and
unabashedly coastal.
He says that there is no magic behind Gawker Media, his three-year-old
venture based in New York. To his mind, it is built around a basic
publishing model. But like it or not in the overheated atmosphere of
blog-o-mania, Mr. Denton, 38, remains one of the most watched
entrepreneurs in the business.
If his reluctance to be interviewed is theater, it is deft theater. A
British expatriate and former Financial Times reporter, Mr. Denton is
tall, slim, and salt-and-pepper handsome, with the slightly
embarrassed air of someone who invested in the dot-com boom and came
out unscathed. (He made millions in two previous ventures -- including
a company called Moreover Technologies, an online news aggregator that
presaged the twitchy, check-this-out linking that now make blogs de
rigueur reading for desk jockeys worldwide.)
STRIDING toward the unadorned third-floor TriBeCa loft that is the
closest thing to a Gawker nerve center, Mr. Denton reiterated, in a
polite, sometimes halting staccato that often fades into a string of
inaudible syllables, that he would not discuss money. He declined to
say if Gawker was profitable, or how much he paid Gawker's dozen or so
bloggers -- editors, as the company calls them.
He fired up a Marlboro Light and, hustling across Canal Street,
chattered obliquely about overhead (minimal in the blogging business),
libel (always a concern) and Fred Durst.
In March, Mr. Durst, the Limp Bizkit front man, sued Gawker, among
other sites, for linking to a sex video in which he appeared.
"Honestly, though, we don't know why you're so mad at us," Gawker's
editor, Jessica Coen, sneered in a March 4 entry. "The situation is
really rather simple. Someone sent us a link to a video of your penis,
we went into shock, and we shared it with the world for about two
hours. Then we wept, found God, took a hot bath, and removed the video
from our site."
Mr. Durst eventually dropped the suit.
A grueling climb led to the quiet, whitewashed loft space where a few
Gawker Media hands -- including Lockhart Steele, the company's
managing editor, and Gina Trapani, the editor of one of the company's
newest blogs, Lifehacker -- were plucking away at laptops. (Gawker
shares the space with another blogger, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan of
Apartment Therapy.)
Mr. Steele, who joined the company in February, is the den mother for
Gawker's far-flung collection of bloggers and is in near constant
communication with them throughout the day via Instant
Messenger. About half of the editors live in New York. The rest are
distributed around the country. In California, Mark Lisanti edits
Defamer, the Los Angeles counterpart to Gawker, and in Colorado, Brian
D. Crecente edits one of the newer sites, Kotaku, dedicated to video
games. In New Orleans, John d'Addario edits Fleshbot, while Ana Marie
Cox covers political gossip from Washington on Wonkette.
Each editor is under contract to post 12 times a day for a flat fee,
Mr. Steele said. (Gawker has two editors and now posts 24 times a
day.) It is best to have eight posts up before noon, if possible, to
keep readers coming back, he said.
The editors scan the Web for the best tidbits. Readers, and apparently
even published authors, send in tips. When a Gawker site highlights
articles from, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, it
is likely, both Mr. Steele and Mr. Denton said, that the article's
author sent an e-mail message to Gawker pointing out its
existence. (This reporter's naiveté about this process was met with
gentle laughter.)
Site traffic is a particular obsession. Gawker draws just over a
million unique visitors a month; Fleshbot, the most popular site,
lures nearly twice that number, and Gizmodo, a site dedicated to
gadgets, roughly 1.5 million. All editors can earn bonuses if they
manage to generate spikes in traffic -- say, with a link to the latest
Paris Hilton crisis or Fred Durst's anatomy.
Ms. Trapani's hour-by-hour traffic statistics serve as the desktop
image on her computer. "It's extremely fast paced," she said. "It's a
lot of output. Some days it's overwhelming without a doubt. Other
days it goes really smoothly if I get some good reader tips and
there's something great going on."
Like Mr. Denton, she was careful not to discuss specifics of Gawker's
business, including how much its editors are paid. But a published
interview with Mr. Steele earlier this year provides some
insight. Bloggers are paid a set rate of $2,500 a month, he told a
digital journalism class at New York University taught by Patrick
Phillips, the editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site focusing
on media news.
Critics of the blog movement wonder whether the hoopla over the
commercial viability of blogs -- particularly as publishing ventures
-- is overstated. "Blogs primarily excel at marketing and promotion
for companies or individuals," Mr. Phillips of I Want Media said. "I
think blogging can catapult unknown writers, and it can give them a
platform if they're talented. But as a stand-alone business, I think
the jury is still out on that."
Mr. Denton, who says that no one, least of all him, is becoming rich
publishing blogs, would seem to agree with that notion. It's not about
the money, he said -- or about corrupting the art of the blogger. "If
someone is saying that we publish according to a routine of at least
12 posts a day and begin in the morning and if someone is sick we
replace them, then I plead guilty," he said. "We believe in regular
posting schedules."
But he also says that nothing he is doing prevents other blogging
models from taking shape, or independent bloggers from logging on and
doing what they have always done. "Some of my own favorite sites are
ones that have no consistency beyond the wit and charm of the writer,"
he said. "There's room for both."
And there is, apparently, a ceiling on Gawker's expansion. Last month,
the company started Sploid, a Drudge-like headline news blog with a
tabloid look, and Mr. Denton says two more titles are planned for the
short term, although he would not be specific about the particular
consumer itches he'll be scratching this time. Having covered
everything from BlackBerries to Beltway gossip, it's hard to imagine
what else looms, but he said writers had already been lined up.
That will bring the number of titles to 14, and Mr. Denton indicated
that 17 seemed a good stopping point, if for no other reason than that
is the number of titles published by Condé Nast.
He also plans to reintroduce Gawker's "blog of blogs," called Kinja -
a service that even Mr. Denton says was rather badly deployed and even
more awkwardly explained in its original form. A team of programmers
has been working for the last two years to revamp the service, which
allows users to explore and scan their favorite blogs in one
place. The new version will be ready in about a month.
SO, onward goes the nonrevolution. "If you take the amount of
attention that has been devoted in the last year to Web logs as a
business and something that's going to change business and compare
that with the real effect and the real money, it's totally
disproportionate," Mr. Denton said, "in the same way all the coverage
of the Internet in the late 90's was out of whack.
"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet
for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he
added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of
Internet media."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company.
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Lisa Minter (lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com)