New York magazine lost two high-ranking employees this week: deputy editor Hugo Lindgren to the revamped Bloomberg BusinessWeek and online managing editor Jessica Coen to Gawker Media’s Jezebel. Gawker’s reacquisition of Coen is the fourth in a recent trend: medium-to-high profile bloggers and reporters, nursed as neophytes on Nick Denton‘s teat, coming back to Gawker Media for a second time. Does this company represent online media’s last best hope?

While Gawker Media has plenty of high-profile women — Anna Holmes, Gina Trapani, Lux Alpatrom, Analee Newitz — it’s gotten some flack for a while now for having a chick-free masthead at its flagship site, Gawker.com. The site that launched such well-known bloggers as Elizabeth Spiers, Jessica Coen and Emily Gould saw its last female editor in December 2008 with the departure of Sheila McClear. Since then it’s been all-male all the time, to the frustration of many readers, watchers, former editors and boyfriends of former editors.

As online writing becomes increasingly a part of the mainstream dialogue in America, “blogger” is no longer a dirty word. Some of the best writers of our time operate exclusively on the internet, but some of the most talented still work under the radar. In this in-depth, magazine-length feature, Mediaite has assembled a list of 25 of the best underappreciated bloggers and explained why they matter.