Another scandal, another Gawker story, and another payday for the person who sold Gawker the news. No big deal, says Nick Denton, the blog impresario: We’ll keep doing it.
Earlier this year, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton announced that he was going to start paying for salacious clips, tips and other submissions, but that he hadn’t worked out the details. Looks like he figured it out: Denton says he paid the source who provided his blog network with the so-called “McSteamy” sex tapes that have earned him both a lot of traffic and a lawsuit.
Eric Spiegelman has a Web video hit on his hands. “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” a series of short clips featuring exactly what the name suggests, is popular, viral, and cheap to make. But he still can’t cover his costs with Internet advertising. Enter the ancillary products, like a new book deal.
Twitter has weighed in on the hacker who rooted through the company’s files and on the Web sites that published some of the stolen info. The short version: Don’t blame Google for our security problems; we need to use better passwords. But do be careful about publishing hacked data; we’re talking to our lawyers. “Bring it on,” says Gawker.
Remember all those stories about Web sites buckling under the weight of all that Michael Jackson traffic? Here’s the flip side, now being promoted by those same Web sites: Look at all of our Michael Jackson traffic! Yahoo, for instance, wants us to know that Jackson’s demise has been its good fortune. “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital” was the site’s “highest clicking” story, while Yahoo News set a record for hourly visitors.
The online classifieds Web site is shutting down its “Erotic Services” section under pressure from state and local officials from around the country. In its place, Craigslist will open an “adult” category. It promises to keep said area cleaner by having employees sweep it periodically for ads that are obviously soliciting prostitution, etc. It won’t keep Craigslist free of bad stuff, but it may make it harder to find.
Some people finish working for Nick Denton’s Gawker Media empire and do their best to never go back to blogging again. Not the veterans of Denton’s Defamer, the showbiz site he rolled into his Gawker flagship in February. The three men–Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale–are essentially reconstituting their old site, using the name and Web address of an even older site, Movieline.com.
Fox News columnist Roger Friedman loves the new “X-Men” movie with Hugh Jackson. But his employers hate his review, which is based on an unfinished version that leaked to the Web last week. It may cost him his job.
Google is laying off 200 people from its sales and marketing group, the company announced today in a blog posting. Google has some 20,000 employees, so the scale of the sackings isn’t earth-shaking news. But the fact that they come from the group that Tim Armstrong ran until he decamped for AOL is interesting.
And they say bloggers don’t work! I had to get off my sickbed today to call David Karp, the CEO of Tumblr, and ask him if he really was in talks to sell his company to Yahoo, as Gawker/Valleywag reported. For the record, Karp says the report is “categorically untrue.”
Media company layoffs are now the rule, not the exception, but this one is still noteworthy: The Associated Press, the workhorse of U.S. journalism, is firing 10 percent of its staff, or about 400 people. Why is this noteworthy? Because the AP, which is actually a cooperative owned by 1,500+ member newspapers, supplies the bulk of the content that fills your daily newspaper or Web site, or whatever.
Another day, another few dozen firings at Time Inc. The Time Warner publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. That brings the total body count to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year.
The Gawker Media boss puts his Consumerist site up for sale and folds his Valleywag tech gossip site into his flagship Gawker gossip site. More moves to come. In fact, it wouldn’t be Denton if there were not more moves to come.
A rumored Election Day mass firing doesn’t materialize. But there will be plenty of budget-tightening at Sumner Redstone’s cable networks.
The New York Times is in lousy shape, so it needs to sell off About.com, the kind-of-portal, kind-of-blog-aggregator it bought from Primedia in 2005. So says Jason Calacanis, whose Mahalo.com is a kind-of-portal, kind of blog-aggregator. Not true, say two people familiar with the Times and About.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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