T/S: Defamer v. Gawker

their weekend guy, foster kamer, is the worst writer on the whole internet

he should post here

naww brian moylan is worse

i like gawker - pretty impressive scrappy bootstrapping operation - they get more traffic than the latimes and a bunch of other big names iirc

lol foster kamer - im always like how can this guy write so many words - not a lot of qc going on there

i think their weekend writing has a lot more leeway/freedom when it comes to editing than the weekday stuff does -- i think as long as the dude keeps the site moving and the commenters involved then they don't really care as much about quality -- who knows tho -- wasn't he the guy who was a major commenter player first anyway?

I hate myself for knowing Gawker lore like so many X-Men family trees but I believe that was Richard Lawson

ah

i like how knowing x-men lore is the LESS nerdy equivalent

some of it i absolutely love and always read because it's mostly otm, some seems like just 'who can we hate on today' and gets tiresome - depends on the writer.

i wonder if the strongly negative tone of the content from certain organizations, and i don't just mean gawker media, is generated above all by the way they treat their own staff. nothing like working for capricious people who fire talented colleagues with no warning and for no reason related to their job performance.

their weekend guy, foster kamer, is the worst writer on the whole internet

I refuse to believe this is real person, it sounds like a name that would be made up for a computer program.

rereading this, i guess i could have got it wrong. but is FK saying obama and h-clinton saved copenhagen here? for some reason this appalled me no end:

http://gawker.com/5430452/climate-changes-bad-lieutenants-barack-and-hillary-bustin-down-doors

FK farewell blitz has been a horror

yeah :-(

Did Gawker's full-content RSS feeds just go excerpt-only for everyone else?

Not just me: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gawker+rss

http://twitter.com/ryantate/status/10241000296

lol foster kamer - im always like how can this guy write so many words - not a lot of qc going on there

― ice cr?m, Monday, February 15, 2010 9:53 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark

lol dude left the other week. glad some1 at gawker is reading ilx for HR tips

YOURE WELCOME

Denton:

Gawker Media is an ad-supported company. RSS ads have never realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads on our website. So, yes, it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt.

Ta-da: http://gawker.com/vip.xml

For those who want their full-content feed back:

http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/10241832261

Yep, what James said!

imo stuff like this makes a good case for Gawker being on some bullshit in not even giving a fair amount of credit/attribution/linkage to the old media they siphon most of their content from (and usually dumb down or sensationalize in the process): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/31/AR2009073102476.html

that said i sure do miss the gawker media checks i was getting on the reg for a while there and i def look at their various sites, albeit not all the time

xp that Post article is depressing as hell, but not for the Gawker writer

newspapers should really act more like gawker, that an editor at a major newspaper still think links are stealing is scary

it's not "scary", but rewriting other people's work -- which is what gawker (and othee mnstrm blogs) does above all else -- isn't anything to brag about.

probably a majority of newspaper writing is rewriting other people's work, and at least gawker tries to add jokes.

say it ain't so, joe

it ain't so

^^^ cut and pasted that from velko's post, depriving him of revenue

Gruber wrote a decent commentary about full-text RSS feeds just a couple days ago.

If you’ve got a model where revenue is tied only to web page views, switching to full-content RSS feeds will hurt, at least in the short term. The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

A reader asking for a full-content RSS feed is a reader who wants to pay more attention to what you publish. There have to be ways to thrive financially from that.

probably a majority of newspaper writing is rewriting other people's work, and at least gawker tries to add jokes.

Tries is the operative word here.

For those who want their full-content feed back:

http://twitter.com/nicknotned/status/10241832261

― ksh, Tuesday, March 9, 2010 5:58 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

thank u ksh, owe you one

probably a majority of newspaper writing is rewriting other people's work, and at least gawker tries to add jokes.

― joe, Tuesday, March 9, 2010 7:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is a pretty dumb thing to say since what i linked was a concrete example of a print writer doing a lot of research and interviews the old-fashioned way, and explaining one of the things happening that's making it much less possible for writers to put that kind of work in (and, like, get paid for it) in the future.

content that involves doing a lot of research and interviews the old-fashioned way is indeed v valuable and praise worthy - its also represents a tiny fraction of what actually gets published - a lot of what does get published is rewriting w/o attribution other outlets news stories -until the washpost et al cio themselves they should stfu

the reaction is still scary, not from the reporter, he can feel deflated because he's unlikely to make any extra money from the publicity (although the gawker guy would have from a link) but for an editor to think that gawker's way of doing things isn't analogous of internet usage in general. this is what i don't get, it's like the internet operates best in a certain way and then editors expect it to act like it should all be printed out tomorrow and sold in a newsagent

http://www.observer.com/2010/media/alex-pareene-leaving-gawker-join-salon

dope -- pareene is consistently great

Wait, he's only 24?

i had the same thought, Ned

yeah, all those Gawk dudes are mad young and make me feel like a total failure tbh

john cook too?

hmm, they have kind of lost their best two writers there

age ain't nothing but a number WGW

Well more like I'm calculating back how young he would have been when he was first on here. Which I guess isn't too surprising.

how do you even get a job at 19. i'm confused.

<3<3<3

awesome <3

I do like his writing far better than Ana Marie Cox's, whom he took over Wonkette from. She retained too much of the suck.com hipster nihilism.

he should post more imo

well i guess im adding the salon war room to my google reader list

http://gawker.com/5521236/the-definitive-guide-to-alex-pareene

St. Ann O'Tate