Gawker Media – sharpest keyboards on the interwebs

The Observer interviews Gawker Media’s Nick Denton

Nick Denton is the blogosphere’s Baron Silas Greenback, sitting pretty in his New York loft/lair, having figured out what EVERYONE wants to know – how to make money off this here blog thing.

I’ve loved Gawkers’ hilariously insulting beatdowns on the ‘internet famous’ for brief periods at a time. I pored over the original Gawker‘s missives from the Conde Naste cafeteria. I laughed at movie stars crashing their Mercs into each other on Defamer. I particularly enjoyed Valleywag while Nick Douglas was at the helm. They were cool, but as I didn’t technically LIVE in New York, LA or Silicon Valley, a lot of it flew over my head. And frankly, there’s too much of it. 12 posts a day is the editorial minimum and, mostly, I don’t have time to trawl through all that in any meaningful way. I see the RSS feeds offer ‘top stories’ only now – let’s see how that goes.

Gawker’s bloggers seem to live the dream, despite Denton’s miserly pay scale, and most, if not all, use it as a springboard to bigger and better things. For me, being a Gawker editor, bashing out snarky one-liners all day on a Powerbook, pausing only go out for pastrami on rye wearing a black turtle neck is total writerly rockstardom (see also: Joe Eszterhas bashing out Basic Instinct in the Hollywood hills fuelled by Jack Daniels, or Woodward and Bernstein having Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play them in the movie).

Bonus link : The Observer’s 50 most powerful blogs – get something new for your RSS reader

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