hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

xp - who's saying "why would you read Gawker"? The quality/skill/value of Gawker writing and staffing is a separate question from why use the service.

fwiw i've had deadspin open in another tab this whole time apparently

otm re: Caity & Rich, with the dining and Disney

how quickly the world has neglected "good-ass kinja"

All I want gawker to know is that every time I've visited their site in the last three years I had my ad blocker on

suck it

relevant? http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/dead-sites-posting

also lol for all denton's focus on "brands" and "brand extension" how has gawker tech done such a disasterous job managing branding across subsite verticals for-like-ever?

the subsites never linked to their capsule mission statements, and they lacked good ways to navigate back into the main sites, or even recognize their connection to the appropriate parent sites, and there was no good way to get an overview of "the gawker universe of edited sites".

the lack of desire to really sort out these basic elements of user experience speaks to some sort of just _laziness_ about core direction from management.

like before big shake-ups of people etc maybe they could just have tried to actually let people figure out how to read the damn site more easily?

why are your subsites not getting readers? idk, can people even find them?

otm, the "sub-sites" always seemed like the strangest afterthoughts w/ no actual site behind it, just like some vague label, and there were a million of them

It was only recently I realised that things like Jez and io9 had anything to *do* with Gawker, I just assumed they all used some blog software.

lol the other day i hit something in the facebook app that brought up things that post a ton in my feed i guess so i could show fewer posts or prioritize, idk i didn't spend long on it before closing the app, but what was funny was like it was generally stuff you'd expect - the ny times, clickhole, nancy grace, v-103 the people's station, russell westbrook, whatever. pages, friends mixed in their too. whatever's feeding the feed. and it had them sorted by like how many things it had spit into the feed that day i guess. and ned was third, like over the ny times and the guardian, w/ 100 posts. this was at like noon!

That sounds about right.

Ned, you're one of the few people I know who spends more time actively trawling a more broad array of information (Internet/ music/ otherwise) than I do.

Tbh ilxor is my most generally reliable aggregator and where I get the majority of my breaking news

likewise

I don't get how right after the Craggs / Read exit there's all this mention of how gizmodo, lifehacker and kotaku are actually most of the business, then everybody forgets to actually get the union contract done, then all the top-of-the-masthead people quit AGAIN, and now we're somehow acting like political snark is the way forward and Cook's memo doesn't even MENTION io9 or Kotaku somehow, also, there is nothing about this on politburo, which I take as a bad sign i.e. Craggs' best idea has already been discarded and it's not even been a quarter. @morninggloria going to Vocativ officially sucks everything.

I've gotten over all my personal shit w/ pareene and respect him as a writer and a keen observer of the scene etc but how the hell does it make sense to Wonkettatize Gawker at this point? Does Denton actually have an idea or a vision at this point? This all seems like flailing, although I guess punctuated equilibrium is a very successful theory, change tends to happen all at once or not at all, etc

I need coffee my prose is shit today

can see this working for the next year or so until the election is over then i can see it totally falling apart when there is less news/outrage cycle etc

Ned, you're one of the few people I know who spends more time actively trawling a more broad array of information (Internet/ music/ otherwise) than I do.

Well, it keeps me engaged, in my own way. And really -- per my new column at the Nashville Scene: http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashvillecream/archives/2015/11/17/neds-atomic-link-bin-thinking-on-paris-questioning-gender-roles-farewells-to-toussaint-and-more -- "You can thank a huge range of friends for suggesting things to their own circles as much as anyone else. Maybe I just like to be my own aggregator."

;-)

― content raggettator (wins), Saturday, 14 February 2015 22:30 (9 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lest we forget, ned won the internet several years ago

itt "literally anyone could do this job" means "I think I could do this job"

on the bright side, the new editorial direction isn't to go the Neetzan Zimmerman all-viral content direction

I'm really good at repeating words in my posts lately

Pareene's memo this morning:
http://jimromenesko.com/2015/11/18/gawker-editor-were-in-the-tank-for-no-candidate/
(SO glad that Romenesko isn't 100% retired.)

There is an untapped market for clever but informed commentary and reporting. I firmly believe this. The problem with Vox is that it’s utterly humorless and the problem with Buzzfeed is that so much of it is utterly stupid. And so we mock Buzzfeed for their viral garbage and Vox for their artless style, but if we’re going to do that, we *have to* make sure that we’re smarter, better, funnier, and sharper than the competition. I want every piece to have a point.

To that end, we’re going to stop doing some of the easy but pointless chuff that we’ve always leaned on for filler – no more “drunk Florida idiot dies in morbidly amusing fashion,” or “horrific crime happens in distant backwater.” I have a deep and abiding love for weird news and blood-and-guts tabloid crime reporting, but this is a rare opportunity to redefine what “a Gawker Story” is, and I don’t think we lose anything by dropping the American Grotesque beat. The ideal Gawker story should expose a meaningful hypocrisy, or reveal an emperor’s nudity, or hold the rare heroes actually working to un-fuck the world up for praise, or make an unexpected but necessary argument.

sounds good to me

"We will not back down. The 500 Days of Kristin will be completed as scheduled." OK, I'm pacified.

wish it was 500 days of this adam sandler picture instead

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CT90SKTVEAAW6I9.jpg

They should totally go after the pretentious reader because those are the ones most likely to click on a banner ad

i enjoy reading an alex column every few days, good nuff

you know what gawker's better than? the first 45 minutes of any NBA game.

xxp Not quiite sure where the needle is being threaded between covering Gamergate (presumably for their women-harassing rather than their nerd-being, right guys?) and ending on the triumphant note of... 500 Days of Kristin?

We have, in Ted Cruz, an actual Reddit Troll Face comic come to life.

easy but satisfying lol

you know what gawker's better than? the first 45 minutes of any NBA game.

blasphemy

certainly better than watching baseball on TV. Not better than watching Palin string a sentence together.

you are drinking early on your birthday

https://twitter.com/kieselaymon/status/666767452789960704

is the new irreverent, politics-based direction really just code for posting dumb shit about Donald Trump constantly

then everybody forgets to actually get the union contract done

i don't think negotiation is required to be particularly prompt, so of course mgmt have every incentive to drag it out

it's just been a very turbulent not-even-a-year over there - every workplace has shakeups, I'm just ready for the shakeups to stop, especially considering every other source of meaningless time-wasting content has been blowing up on me for like two years in a row at this point. Balloon Juice is basically the Betty Cracker Blog now (and that's okay, she's fun, but seriously John, get back on the stick), Sports On Earth is like 1/17th the site it started out as, Grantland RIP, etc. Leah and Erin and Tommy and Max were good at their jobs! Why do people who are good always have to leave? If TPM and LGM go to shit I'm just going to start playing diablo clones on my phone full-time

Balloon Juice is basically the Betty Cracker Blog now (and that's okay, she's fun, but seriously John, get back on the stick)

Think he prefers Twitter now.

Unacceptable. When did ">1 sentence" become the new "long form"

TPM has been shit for about a year now - basically since Josh Marshall decided to try and turn it into Gawker/Salon.

TPM isn't shit, but it's going to shit

I only read JMM's editor's blog posts - I ignore the vast majority of the rest. I consider the livewire and premium crap to be a support system so that I can continue to read his occasional insights for free.

I also understand that what I just said is symptomatic of why all the stuff I love is kind of going to shit - Tbogg, Edroso and Pierce have paying homes, as do Mike Tanier and many others, but they all seem constrained, because they all have to write predictable content that makes for predictable clickthrough rates or something. I don't know what has to happen but it seems like we really are headed to where any non-aggregator site that can just sustain off of ads sold next to the work of others is going to have to resort to a paywall. Or become virtually unreadable because of sponsored content and intrusive ads.

Maybe prose content becomes like Twitch? or cable? Actually it already feels like cable sometimes (FUCKING ADS AGAIN?!?! ffwd ffwd skip skip)- I might want the Twitch direction. I need to sleep on this.

https://medium.com/absurdist/the-bible-written-in-new-york-city-blog-voice-d8aa8341e081

that post is hilarious

JUST SAY IT'S THE AWL, IT'S WHAT WE'RE ALL THINKING

did she write that in the subway on the way to work the day it was due?

i wonder was she hired for her 4k twitter followers?

u mad doggie?

https://boards.greenhouse.io/gawkermedia/jobs/127752?t=2ctqpi#.Vk_pUcso7qA

<3 max but also <3 that 'max read resigned in protest' is a minor meme

if they retooled then HOW ARE THEY STILL POSTING ABOUT KRISTIN WHATSERNAME

u mad