Credit where credit is due: Tina Brown is a publishing icon who has had an enormous impact on the way information is packaged and consumed. She is also lovely reminder of a bygone era of profitable and well-funded magazines that cost a lot of money to produce, but also afford a lavish lifestyle for their senior management. So it was with great glee that we discovered Gawker's Ryan Tate's delightful exegesis on Brown, in the context of her one and half year-old glossy website The Daily Beast. (more...)

Long before Gawker Media changed the way we consume information, analysis and media, there was a surprising little literary journal out of Chicago's south side called The Baffler. Edited by Thomas Frank, who's also known as columnist for WSJ and best-selling author of What's The Matter With Kansas, The Baffler compendium Commodify Your Dissent was a must-read for every literary hipster in lower Manhattan in the mid to late 90s. Well good news now-aging-hipsters. The Baffler is back with a brand new issue! (more...)

video NBC News White House Correspondent Savannah Guthrie is on the way up. She was recently named one of 2010's Faces to Watch in TV by the LA Times, and has just launched a new show, "The Daily Rundown," on MSNBC (9am EDT), with fellow White House correspondent Chuck Todd. Savannah gets real with Inside the White House Press Corps, with some surprising observations about Twitter, media bias, and the role of pudits in shaping the news. (more...)

New York magazine lost two high-ranking employees this week, as announcements surfaced that deputy editor Hugo Lindgren would move to the revamped Bloomberg BusinessWeek, while online managing editor Jessica Coen would reenter the Gawker Media world that spawned her, this time as executive editor of the women's blog Jezebel. But apart from possible bellwether changes at New York, Gawker Media'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. Doree Shafrir, Richard Lawson, Joel Johnson and Jessica Coen: If these names make you think of people you follow on Twitter or Tumblr, read on. It seems like their movement -- usually away from corporate or old guard institutions -- means that this is the future. Right here on the internet? (more...)

the aughts "Thus, regular readers of a Hearst paper would find other newspapers insipid, destitute of the racy detail to which they were accustomed. Conversely, a reader of the sedate New York Times, on turning to a Hearst sheet, would be apt to shudder at the discovery of a frantic world he had not dreamed existed." --W.A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst

As you may have heard, Gawker was recently named the blog of the decade by Adweek. Three other Gawker Media blogs, Gizmodo, Deadspin, and Lifehacker, were finalists. Adweek noted that Gawker itself was only number seven among Gawker Media properties in terms of traffic, but proclaimed it "the template for what a blog should be" -- a quote eagerly snatched up by Gawker's advertising department. Leaving aside the question of "should," Gawker has undeniably set the template for what the blogs of this decade aspire to be. (more...)

Yesterday, we wondered about the future of newspaper advertising and a move toward the internet, but acknowledged that bloggers face a new predicament of impossibly low rates. But there are other technological pitfalls -- just ask Gawker Media, who was scammed by a client pretending to be Suzuki into running ads that crashed readers' browsers and even installed malware onto their systems. (more...)

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 and reporters of our time operate exclusively on the internet, and millions regularly read their work. Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington, even Perez Hilton; these are big, newsmaking names that many people have heard before.  (more...)

Today's Gawker Media redesign unveils a new feature that attempts to optimize the loyalty of the network's already robust fan base. Gawker Open Forums now exists on all of the group's nine blogs, integrating social networking, crowdsourcing and standard discussion forums, leaving each blog as not only a conversation starter, but a channel where news can be broken, shared and commented on by readers, all in one place. (more...)

Seven years after its founding, Gawker Media is getting more online traffic than the LA Times and nearly as much as the New York Times -- and with a staff a fraction of their sizes. Need evidence of their influence? They are now effectively running the state department. A look at their growth and impact after the jump. (more...)