David Carr on Nick Denton
In a Sunday Times article, David Carr profiles Nick Denton, and shows that Nick is both a mainstream media mogul and scared of his own shadow. He has apparently hit some cashflow bump, and has started laying off and reassigning people all over his fledgling empire:
[from A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs by David Carr]Laying off journalists? How very old media.
"Better to sober up now, before the end of the party," he said in announcing the realignment. As of last Friday, Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr. Denton was summarily executing underperformers.
"We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company," Mr. Denton said last week. "You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognize what isn't working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are."
Sounds sensible, but if it is so much commonsense, why a big shuffle all at once? Was it the Rafat Ali post-funding mixer that stirred Denton up? And what the hell's going on with this 'after the party's over' dirge? Jarvis has started singling "Forever Blowing Bubbles" because of that party, too.
I think we are lurching toward asavage corrosion of traditional media, and the insiders are scrambling to try to hold it together long enough to retire. What about the new breed of mainstream media types -- like Denton -- who have embraced the trappings of the blogosphere but none of the edge sensibilities (except for a studied disdain for superficial conventions of traditionalism)?
I predict they will struggle along, living in the middleground, neither the new or the old. But the breakout media plays will be based on individual voices, building brand based on participation and purpose, not by hiring post-adolescents and handing them a style manual and a seven posts a day mandate. No wonder Denton is moving things around: the model is no more satisfying than reality TV, and after the third or fourth season people are hoping for something fresh, and they will turn off the TV.
So I don't accept the "end of the party" downbeat messages from Denton and Co as any more than self-universalization. Gawker's Alexa numbers are down over the last three months, Fleshbot looks like it has leveled out, and Sploid never really came up out of the sludge in the first place. Yeah, sure. Time to sever some heads, move things around. But it won't work: the problem is the model, not the staff.
Rather gauche, relying on Alexa numbers when Denton publishes the actual stats: http://www.nickdenton.org/images/gmg_traffic_jun_2006_jpg.jpg
Not to be a dick, but Gawker Media ain't dyin'.
Rocketboom, however...
Posted by: Nick Douglas | July 05, 2006 at 09:16 AM