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?

the aughts

As you may have heard, Gawker was recently named the blog of the decade by Adweek, which proclaimed it “the template for what a blog should be.” Leaving aside the question of “should,” Gawker has set the template for what the blogs of this decade aspire to be. Gawker Media was founded in 2002. In those seven years, its founder Nick Denton has built an empire, and forever changed the game, how it’s played — and who gets to play it.