Abram Sauer Online

Yes. Yes that is an ad on Gawker for Old Navy clothing.

You ever see two teenage boys whip their dicks out and measure them?

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.