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Wonkette Editor Jim Newell To Replace Alex Pareene As Gawker Political Editor

by Frances Martel | 7:43 pm, May 25th, 2010

» 2 comments

Well, this will do something to silence those who complained that Gawker would not survive after the major staff rearrangement earlier this year. After it’s politics editor Alex Pareene left for Salon last month, Gawker media has hired Wonkette editor Jim Newell to replace him; or, as Newell put it: “After replacing Alex Pareene at Wonkette in 2007, I will now replace… Alex Pareene… at Gawker’s politics slot, which he left very recently. As long as I keep blatantly copying his style, I should have steady employment for life, as he is very talented.”

It’s a fairly foolproof move for Gawker, who lost Newell and company in 2008 when Wonkette became independent of Gawker Media. Newell has built up a following over at Wonkette and during his tenure, the blog won a 2008 Weblog award for best liberal blog and received other awards from Vanity Fair and the Bloggies.

Newell told Mediaite that he was “excited to be trying something new! Even though I will basically write about the same stuff, in my same voice, although maybe without going on so many absurd, made-up tangents. And I’m looking forward to working with the latest 50,000-person staff over there! Hopefully we will all be great friends, but over the Internet, since I’m choosing to stay in Washington D.C. for some reason.”

Wonkette had its own mini-exodus early last year as editors Sara K. Smith and Juli Weiner moved on to motherhood and Vanity Fair, respectively. In the wake of Newell’s expected departure, the blog now relies upon managing editor Ken Layne, intern Riley Waggaman, and an array of contributors that drop in at different times during the week.

Newell’s tearjerking goodbye is here, and, in homage, here is my favorite paragraph of creative writing from Newell’s time at Wonkette, describing his experience at a Tea Party rap concert:

There was a rapper, too! He rapped about taxes and saving the country and Freedom. When your editor asked wingnut expert Dave Weigel, who was of course at this thing and furiously scribbling his little notepad notes like a nerd, whether we were actually witnessing a conservative rapper doing a conservative rap song before a crowd of predominantly elderly white people, he said, “Yeah, but this isn’t his best song.” Man, Weigel needs to get a new beat.

[Photo via Mediabistro]

Gawker, Jim Newell, media hires, Wonkette

http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

I’ve read Wonkette since the days of Ana Marie and for years, I read it more than any other Gawker or former Gawker property, but that has sort of reversed over the last year or so. Of course my measure of devotion is kind of relative because I’m on Gawker multiple times a day and I only tend to head to Wonkette once or twice a day, but perhaps the largest measure of my participation is from my comments because unfortunately for Ken, he was left with the old-fashioned, unthreaded, unmoderated conversations.

I like Jim and I think he’ll do well on the higher profile site. As he says in one of the quotes, he may have to temper his style a bit because though they break plenty of stories and the site is definitely worthy of all the praise, Peggy Noonan once referred to them as “the dizzy children of Wonkette” and Gawker seems to have made great strides toward leaving a lot of the snark for the sake of snark, behind.

Thankfully, considering some of the misfires of Gawker hires, Jim is known and liked by most of the community and unlike their worse performer in modern history, he knows the value of reading and participating in the comment threads. After all, through the years, he has shown no reluctance to crawling into the mud with the rest of us.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

Note: Hopefully no one will interpret my above comment as an aversion to snark and I can make or take a joke with the best of us, but as Jim noted in his quote, there is slightly different tone to the two blogs and just as there are things that I’ll say on Gawker that I would never say here, the same can be said about the comments to the two sites.

And again, Jim and his style is known and well-liked, so I’m sure he’ll do quite well.