Nick Denton’s little publishing empire often doesn’t get the credit deserved. Among the new media ops, click-whores like Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post grab the spotlight. But their granddaddy, Gawker Media, knows better 13 years since its founding—literally three lifetimes as measured in online publishing. Forget dog years. Denton’s shop is ancient, and it thrives by reincarnating in place. The Gawker in 2015 bears little resemblance to the circa 2002—Hell, even 2013. That’s a good thing.
What I always liked about the new media property: Application of newspaper-like editorial ethics for getting scopes, sourcing stories, and producing original content to online news gathering. All the while writing is current and cantankerous, and editors experiment with different design, content production, and stylistic strategies. Stated differently: Gawker is the best of print tabloid journalism applied to online publishing. Bottom-feeding aggregators that imitate the tabloid headline style, and dong so grope pageviews, are piss-poor imitations.
Today’s “How to Read Gawker in 2015” post by Max Read lays out brilliantly-managed editorial policies that bottom-feeders daren’t imitate but every other news content site seeking to build audience should adopt. The bright bulbs at Gawker aren’t dim with age but brilliant.
First change affects the homepage. Read writes (Frak me, is that an oxymoron or what):
Gawker.com is going to slow down. Don’t worry—as an editorial operation, we’ll still be producing as much writing as we did before (probably even more). We’re just going to put less of it on the front page. Instead of publishing the majority of our stories directly to the front page, we’ll be publishing them on to a set of subject-focused sub-blogs.
The “diagonals”, as he calls the “sub-blogs”, aren’t new for Gawker—there are just a few more of them. Like tabloids that put blood-dripping news here, features there, and celeb gossip in another place, Gawker uses diagonals to push out content to people who want to read this or that but not all the other things. That’s good.
What’s bad: There is, or was, too much flow on the homepage driving good content off. The front-page design changes better reflect stock-and-flow journalism. Before the changes, it was flow-flow, from the top and to the subs.
Stock and flow is an economic concept that Robin Sloan applies to blogging/new media/journalism. He explains, in January 2010:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you pro duce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
In Robin’s assessment, stock is more evergreen content. Gawker applies the concept differently by treating stock as best of the day—perhaps week or bit longer—while opening more flow to sub-blogs. He writes;
The front page will update less frequently than it did before, and it will feel a bit more like the front page of a newspaper, with the best, most important, and most representative work from across the sections. At best that will mean exclusive stories, original reporting, strong arguments, funny jokes, breakout posts, and breaking news: The best and most popular of what Gawker is producing at any given moment.
Besides direct flow through the diagonals, RSS feeds and social media will frequently refresh, too. All while choice stock morsels fill the main landing page and stay there longer. Someone give Gawker geniuses a raise. There is some smart editorial planning that merges together some of the best of new and old media concepts. Read writes:
For a lot of our readers, who come to Gawker through links on Facebook and Twitter (or in their email or IMs), this won’t mean much of a change except a slightly different URL and logo. For those of you who visit Gawker.com directly but infrequently, the change should be a good thing. Instead of our former posting schedule pushing articles down the page faster than anyone could keep up, the stories we’re proudest of and happiest with will get their time to shine.
Here’s why bottom-feeding pageview grubbers are unlikely to imitate Gawker: “It’ll be messy, a lot of our most dedicated readers might hate it, and traffic will take a hit”, Read writes. God forbid that the Business Insiders of the World Wide InterWebs scrap one pageview in the present for future benefits to readers and reporters.
Read is right: “We’ll be rewarded in the long run by providing readers with more focused ways to get the stories they want, and by giving writers more freedom to experiment without ‘front page’ pressure”.
Photo Credit: Linda Tanner