Every year internet geeks gather for five days in Austin, TX to discuss the state of interactive media — and more importantly, what the future holds next — at South by Southwest Interactive. This year, old school tools like Facebook were barely mentioned: the hottest topics were online privacy, location-based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, and perhaps most interestingly: the future of journalism. (more...)

breaking Well this is interesting and surprising news. Gawker head Nick Denton just sent out this memo to staff announcing that they are acquiring Cityfile, the New York news/gossip site founded by Remy Stern in July 2008. Perhaps even more surprising (shocking?) is the news that Gawker editor-in-chief Gabriel Snyder, who just oversaw Gawker's best monthly numbers ever, will be departing and Stern will be taking his place (update: in his memo, below, Snyder says he was "canned"). Denton's memo below. Below that Snyder's memo to staff, which apparently went out one minute earlier. In it Snyder says: "For reasons which I'm not too clear on, but I'm sure Nick Denton will explain momentarily, I am being replaced as editor-in-chief of Gawker." In terms of the Cityfile purchase Denton wouldn't confirm a purchase price (though we hear Stern was elsewhere asking for seven figures when approached by others), nor would he address whether Stern's new role was part of the acquisition deal. He did tell us that "Remy is personally very impressive. He helped make the Radar website a real contender for a while. And Cityfile's people database is phenomenal. It will be a great cornerstone for our tag pages." Cityfile will be folded into Gawker.com similar to Valleywag and Defamer. Denton's memo below. (more...)

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...)

As the rumored release date of the Apple Tablet nears (January 27th, according to numerous sources), so too, it would seem, does the end of Nick Denton’s mad quest to make Steve Jobs get serious about their relationship and sue him already.  It promises to be interesting. (more...)

In the mid-1950s Confidential was ruining the marriage of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball -- at least in the eyes of the American people. "'I knew Desi was inviting me for more than a drink,’ said the babe," according to the damning story. Thing is, the "babe" was a prostitute, paid by Confidential, one of the nation's first gossip magazines and the subject of the new book Shocking True Story, reviewed today in the New York Times. (more...)

The Tangled Webs Nothing aids the launch of a new website like a little bit of controversy! Not that Andrew Breitbart necessarily needs help in launching a website (or attracting attention) -- he has a fairly good track record. Nevertheless, yesterday's launch of Breitbart's new site Big Journalism definitely made some unintended waves. (more...)

soundbite

“I keep reading all of these Nick Denton memos for Gawker...these ferocious memos to writers where it’s like ‘get a million pageviews this week or you’re fired!’ Maybe we’ll have to do that! But it’s not my personality at all.”

-- Tucker Carlson, four days before the launch of his new website, which boasts a staff of 21 editors and reporters, has yet to lose his idealism about the Internet! It's a lovely thing to behold. And, all things being equal, maybe Tucker will make it work (and we certainly wish him the best) and manage to get the traffic his backers and advertisers need to survive without resorting to an abundance of slideshows and SEO friendly headlines (and if not, welcome to the Internet!). In the meantime, I think he may want to reread Denton's latest, which actually appears to be valuing the original over the tantalizing as a way to succeed in this new traffic world.

Gawker brought in the coming end of the decade in a way that only Gawker could: by running a "douche of the decade" poll. The winner, Girls Gone Wild honcho Joe Francis, was not pleased. He didn't especially object to the "douche" label -- good luck making an issue of that when The New York Times runs A1 stories musing on the nature of douchiness -- but to another, more loaded word they used to describe him: rapist. Francis' back-and-forth with Gawker's legal department is revealing in many ways, and raises the question of what, if anything, the gossip site can't get away with. (more...)

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies.  The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. (more...)

Remember the McSteamy Tapes? From way back in August, before the Tea Partiers hijacked health care, before Sarah Palin officially went Rogue, before Tiger Woods drove his car into a fire hydrant. Here's a quick recap in case the case has faded from scandal memory in the interim. (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...)

We've noted a few times in passing on this blog that it sometimes feels like the Gawker websites are determining how media will look online going forward. But today it looks like Gawker is taking one step closer to the mainstream, or at least how the mainstream used to look. (more...)

It's no secret that grown-ups love the Harry Potter series almost as much as kids - maybe even more, based on certain grown-up references that the average 12-year-old can't quite yet appreciate. More to the point, by this time a whole bunch of Harry Potter fans who were once kids, back when the book came out, are now all grown up. Either way, that means a whole lot of us at Mediaite are unashamed, unabashed Harry Potter fans. After its worldwide record-breaking weekend (which a few of us contributed to), we got to talking about certain parallels between the magical land of Hogwarts and the equally magical land of headlines, bylines, cutlines, chyrons, blog pickup and declining ad pages. Turns out, the two have a lot in common! Before we knew it, we were shouting out names of media muggles like Hermione answering a pop quiz. After careful (and nerdily meticulous) consideration, we've come up with a few examples for you. (We like to think of the Power Grid as our own little version of the Marauder's Map.) Here below, for your edification and enjoyment, is our own version - let's call it "Harry Potter and the Media Muggles." Mischief managed!

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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...)

video On Friday, hours after the Heene family had appeared on a succession of morning talk shows to repeatedly state that Thursday's Balloon Boy adventures had not in fact been a hoax, Business Insider announced that they had "alleged proof" that the story was a hoax after being contacted by a "Denver-area student who claims to have worked with Falcon's father, Richard Heene, on a reality show proposal for ABC." Money quote (literally): (more...)

Perhaps the most interesting observation to come out of yesterday's Magazine Innovation Summit was not Gawker head Nick Denton's revelation that "At meetings at Gawker, we quite shamelessly rip off things that magazines do well...We don't sit around dissecting the New York Times." Or that Gawker's habit of posting headlines first and filling in the story later is all part of "stumbling toward the truth...We aim to be accurate over the long term." Nope! Regular readers of the site are probably all familiar with these habits/editorial mandates. More interesting was Slate.com chairman Jacob Weisberg's keen remark that Gawker "is now faced with the challenge of not morphing into the sort of journalism it often likes to ridicule." Which is true, sort of. (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...)

"One interesting thing about biggest recent Gawker Media scoops -- Pink phone (Gizmodo, yesterday), Scientology marketing vid, Erin Andrews peephole, Microsoft tablet, Josh Hamilton falls off wagon and McSteamy threeway. All the breakout stories revolve around pictures. No surprise to anyone from TV or the celebrity magazine world, I'm sure." (more...)

TMZ.com is reporting that Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart have filed a $1 million lawsuit in a Los Angeles court against Gawker.com over the much-clicked upon sex-tape the website posted of the two (plus former beauty queen Kari Ann Peniche) last month. Per TMZ: (more...)

Have you seen Gawker's 'McSteamy, His Wife and a Fallen Beauty Queen's Naked Threesome' sex video yet? The post, which went up yesterday afternoon, includes an edited down NSFW video of Eric Dane, his wife, actress Rebecca Gayheart and "beauty-queen-turned-Hollywood-madam" Kari Ann Peniche, has currently clocked 1,375,051 views. It is Gawker's most-viewed post this year, and earlier today surpassed Gawker's third most-trafficked post, 'Sarah Palin's Personal Emails.' In the five minutes it's taken me to write this much down, the post has seen an additional 7,000 views. It seems reasonable to speculate that McSteamy could top Gawker's second most-trafficked post ever -- hello old friend Montauk Monster! (1,890,823 views) -- by the end of the day. In case you're wondering, Tom Cruise and His Scientology Tape still holds top spot with 3,088,565 views. It's probably worth noting that all of these stories crossed over from the blogosphere and into the MSM world -- GMA covered the Dane vid this morning. (more...)

At the end of last week, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a profile of a niche consultant — a "generational guru" — who teaches clients to communicate with members of different generations. Later that day, Gawker's Hamilton Nolan picked up the story, snarked it down, added a couple of links — one at the top, one at the bottom — and posted it. Business as usual, right? Wrong. (more...)

Last fall, after laying off 19 employees, Gawker head Nick Denton predicted the end of media as we know it! Turns out Denton may have overstated matters, at least where Gawker is concerned. Denton is now reporting a 45% increase in advertising revenue. Says Denton:

"Sometimes there's consolation to be found in congenital pessimism; I'd rather be wrong and thriving than right and dead."

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Like it or not, sponsored content is a common practice all over the web.  Daily Telegraph, Gawker Media, Mediaite, The New York Times, LA Times, and National Geographic have all incorporated sponsored content amongst their editorial in some fashion. The practice is not native to online content and dates all the way back to the 1600s when the Japanese called them "Hikifuda" or drawing cards. (more...)

Paying sources for information tends to give august old media types ulcers, but Nick Denton, the trailblazing 'bad boy' at the helm of the Gawker blog armada, announced that he plans to go just that. In an interview with Nieman Journalism Lab yesterday, he said that Gawker Media's recent return to page view pay opens the door for "checkbook journalism." Meaning? If you send Gawker a tip that gets picked up in a big way, you get a cut of the ad revenue.  This is how Denton described it to Nieman: (more...)

A quick glance at our Twitter feed yesterday revealed that Gawker's Nick Denton was a panelist at this year's Apsen Institute Ideas Festival. It was a double glance actually -- Nick Denton and the old guard Aspen Institute are not the likeliest of bedfellows. A Google and Twitter search proved us correct -- turns out Denton is indeed at AIF09 and on a morning panel with Jason Calacancis and moderator Jeff Jarvis, no less. Topic? The death of media, naturally! (more...)