Wolff: Gawker is still Gawker

Michael Wolff | USA TODAY

Gawker, the multimillion dollar gossip and bile website, reined in the worst of its antisocial behavior this summer after a widespread backlash over the particularly sadistic pummeling it gave a publishing executive without public position or profile using details of his private life leaked to it by a would-be extortionist.

Gawker Media owner and mastermind Nick Denton expressed his personal disapproval about the bad judgment of his staff — a cult-like group of Denton retainers and protégées — and proclaimed his intention to remake the site into something kinder and gentler

The overhaul and relaunch of Gawker Media's flagship site was announced last week in The New York Times. Not incidentally, the story was written by Times media reporter Ravi Somaiya, a longtime friend and social buddy of Denton’s and part of the wide media network, that Denton — despite Gawker’s outsider rage against media insiders, and Denton’s personal hostility to the media establishment — has long cultivated.

Indeed, in the months after the Gawker attack on the publishing executive, Denton made a concerted effort to consult various media figures, among them favorite Gawker targets — myself included — about the future of the site. His assurance was that he was seeking talent from outside the famously insular Gawker culture, “adults,” he said, who would be able to take Gawker from resentful peanut gallery to a new level of journalistic authority and influence: “It’s a great opportunity. And it’s time.” He, along with company President Heather Deitrick, a young lawyer often at Denton’s side, began interviewing outside candidates to assume editorial direction of the company, including former Bloomberg Businessweek editor Josh Tyrangiel, and former New York magazine editor John Homans.

But, in fact, the new Gawker, according to last week’s announcement, turns out to be a site that will be run by longtime Gawker staffers John Cook and Alex Pareene, both who have spent almost their entire careers working for Denton (both briefly leaving and hurriedly returning), excelling at Gawker-brand cruelty. The new editorial slant is not so much to change Gawker’s ad hominem style of insult and shaming but merely to move it to more specifically political targets. Still, Pareene told Somaiya, it would also “include coverage of big business, the media and culture when appropriate.” In other words, nothing much seems to have changed at all.

It was rather like a hate-fueled political party trying out, wink wink, some more coded and less overt language that might appeal to people who needed to feel better about its past excesses and extremes.

But, in a sense, it was the opposite too. Gawker’s politics had always been the hardcore goony leftist kind, hence a new political focus might let Gawker be even more Gawkerish, toward candidates and political fixtures, but, as well, toward anybody else who might wander into the harm’s way of Gawker’spitiless and fouled-mouthed world view.

This new strategy was also the answer to a digital media riddle. Within the economic limits of digital journalism — Gawker, along with all other digital media companies, faces ever-declining ad rates and rising traffic demands — how do you make a product of superior quality and stature? Answer: You really can’t.

Denton was said to be astonished by the salary levels of “adult” editors from outside digital media.

What’s more, the business basis of digital media and hence the essential nature of digital journalism is that traffic is derived from an ever-greater number of stories produced at ever-more economical cost.

Although Gawker, unlike many of its competitors, has periodically devoted resources to actually breaking news, its primary business is in quickly rewriting stories originally written by traditional news organizations. That’s actually the business of most digital news organizations — Gawker’s alumni have become a reliable low-cost source of industrial-strength rewriting for many traffic-desperate sites — with the goal of rewriting more stories and doing it cheaper than other digital news organizations. The hope is that beyond just writing more of them, you might somehow distinguish your rewrites from your competitor.

BuzzFeed, for instance, a super-strength rewriter, brings traffic to its unending avalanche of cheap content through its superior gaming of social media distribution channels, most notably Facebook. But that involves constant new technology development and traffic arbitrage strategies, in the end quite a costly approach.

The profitable Gawker, on the other hand, has more economically distinguished its rewrites through the audacity of its name calling, the rudeness of its language and the bravado with which it skirts actual libel. “Can they really get away with that?” is the question that provides Gawker’s main traffic bait.

In fact, Gawker now faces something of a serious threat from an invasion of privacy claim brought by wrestler Hulk Hogan. The case, due to be tried before a local Florida jury, might well result in an award that, even if it is ultimately reversed on First Amendment grounds, might so financial encumber Gawker that it could result in the company’s demise. Denton’s worries about the Hogan lawsuit are said to be part of the reason he uncharacteristically retreated from the controversy over Gawker’s invasion of the media executive's privacy.

Surely eager to protect a personal fortune of as much as several hundred million dollars wrapped up in his business, and as eager to be included in the establishment as he seems bitter about being excluded, Denton did appear to be genuinely interested in making Gawker a more select and smarter journalism organization.

But in the end, no doubt realizing that Gawker had become shockingly boring since its post-backlash better behavior policy, Denton seems to have made the more astute decision that Gawker’s business, and unique selling proposition, is about rancor and character assassination. That’s what it knows how to profitably do.