Look at this. Gawker appears to be slowly spinning its Deadspin title into more of a comprehensive male-oriented site Deadspin XY. It makes sense for Denton to capitalize on the audience, especially since the blog faces so much competition in the very segment it practically created.
It’s like Esquire’s more athletic brother. Wonder when we’ll see the first post on fashion.
With eulogies like John Cook’s, Wilson is certainly glad he’s passed. Was he a flawed politician? Indeed. Would we trade almost any of today’s politicians, on either side, for him? Yes.
Cook is supposed to be the nuanced one… right?
For a long time now, Gawker has been playing with various forms of ad content. It did it’s blood vampire blog thing and Gizmodo did a full advertorial “Gawker Luxury Gift Guide” thing over the holidays that was barely identifiable as advertising. And then it began inserting ads that looked like blog posts; though these inclusions always clearly labeled “advertisement”and the color coded to distinguish them from other editorial posts. Fleshbot was the only one that used the same colors, until now.
An ad for Nokia (below) finally breaks the color barrier, with its “advertisement” tag colored the same as all of the other surrounding editorial content. Tricky, Nick, tricky.
Contextual advertising FAILs are fun. Contextual posting editorial FAILs are even more fun.
Below, Gawker shows how it’s done:
Oh lookiethere, Gawker’s Richard Blakeley is thoughtlessly using the term “Indian Giver” in a headline describing Jay Leno’s thoughtless behavior. How… classy: “Jay Leno’s Shocking 2004 Indian Giving Promise to Conan O’Brien”
UPDATE: Looks like Richard maybe got an email from somebody or something as the headline has been amended (below). Of course, there is no correction note of this change:
Hey, I know it’s all very cool to hate on Balckwater for being a terrible private machine that profits off death and misery and war. But does that really make it hunky dory to make the tired, overused, blogger ha-ha (!!) exclamations about Blackwater personnel being killed? (Aparently not!)
“I think the short answer is that writers go back because Gawker Media sites and sites modeled after them spent the bulk of this past decade systematically obviating and destroying most all of writers’ other options for regular employment. We’ll all work at Gawker one day!”
Emily Gould on why writers return to Gawker (”Doree Returns (To Gawker)“)
I would also hazard that the “style” needed to be a good Gawker writer just does not translate well to any other medium. Magazines do not want shallowly-researched snark. Ditto, newspapers. Meanwhile, writers for other Gawker sites like Gizmodo and Deadspin have specialized knowledge bases that translate throughout targeted industries. That is to say, A Gizmodo writer could probably easily move to PC Magazine or wherever. What is a Gawker writer’s specialized knowledge base? Media? Only for a tiny few.
Not to say that Gawker writers cannot give magazines and other media the content they want, they just don’t excel at it any more than the glut of writers out there. And once they experience that, Gawker looks like a warmplace to return to flex what they are best at.
As a weekend editor, Gawker’s Foster Kamer seems to churn out what the audience comes looking for. But when he turns on the indignation, I cannot think of anyone worse on such a large-scale platform. Case in point, his giant fuck-you to the Rage Against the Machine/X-Factor #1 pissing contest in the U.K. (”Rage Against the Machine Bests Simon Cowell’s Pop Music Robots In Sony Pissing Contest“)
Kamer’s ultimate point seems to be that Rage is without grounds to be self-righteous because they share a label (Sony) with X Factor:
“But the problem with so many well-intended efforts is that they’re half way to hell. Who gets the money from this? Sony! Sony gets RATM’s money and money from the records the kid Cowell’s repping. So what’s the point? Revolution, shmevolution. If Rage Against the Machine really cared, they’d just make a new record already and release it independently. Now they’re just old and stumbled into a pissing contest with an 18 year-old pop star that led to them checking to see if their globalization-protesting dicks still work.”
Rage’s Tom Morello has said the band will be donating the royalties to Shelter and Youth Music.
Is Foster’s memory so poor that he cannot remember his own charity project of just a few weeks ago? “The Gawker Sarah Palin Slam Book: Bid on This Literary Treasure for Charity.” That involved a bunch of authors and writers signing a copy of Sarah Palin’s memoir and then auctioning it for charity. One signatory was Colum McCann, of whom Foster wrote:
“2009 NBA Fiction Prize winner Collum McCann… wrote: “‘For we must love this poor earth, for we have not seen another…’ Go Obama!” Awesome.”
Foster might be interested to know then that both Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue share an imprint: HarperCollins Canada. “The problem with so many well-intended efforts is that they’re half way to hell.” Indeed.
So does something like this just not compute to Kamer? Or does he not care? Or is his outrage just pitifully manufactured? I don’t know.
Earlier: Gawker’s Palin Problem: Burning Books is Ok Sometimes
UPDATE: Foster responds in a comment, reproduced after the jump:
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