Can Gawker Get Its Groove Back?

I'd been operating under the assumption that the recent convulsions at Gawker Media were of interest to a vanishingly small niche, but I guess I was wrong, because The New York Times has decided there's a story there. And we all know that when the Times declares something a story, it's a story, and not before.

So: Has Gawker, as Allen Salkin puts it, "jumped the snark?"

Well, yes. Quite some time ago, in fact. The better question is: Can it jump back?

Gawker's problems predate, by a lot, its recent editorial exodus. They have their root in a fallacy held, at least until recently, by owner Nick Denton: that was possible for the site to continue to increase its traffic indefinitely while maintaining its hold on its core audience of what New York termed the "creative underclass."

It wasn't possible; the posts that produce Gawker's huge traffic spikes are seldom, if ever, the kind of media-insider gossip that so many of us started going there for in the first place. But because the page view bonanza of, say, a John Fitzgerald Page is so huge, the focus was allowed to wander from media gossip. Gawker became like that fishing boat in The Perfect Storm that strays farther and farther from its home port chasing schools of swordfish, until eventually it ends up stranded at sea.

Or, to use a more indigenous metaphor, imagine Gawker as a magazine with both subscribers (those core "creative underclass" readers) and newsstand buyers (infrequent readers who drop in for the big traffic hits). As time went on, the site came to take the subscribers for granted and cater more and more to the newsstand buyers, even though the two groups are interested in totally different types of content. Think The New Yorker versus People.

Without a true mission other than to generate page views, Gawker became a place where the writers alternated their own obsessions -- yoga, Brooklyn, Achewood, Julia Allison -- with the obsessions of the great collective unconscious that is the web. Sometimes a writer's self-indulgence would serendipitously produce a lot of clicks, but, when that didn't happen, there was always a douchebag-of-the-week to pummel.

The concept of "a Gawker item" became a tautology: It was whatever a Gawker writer would write, and whatever a Gawker reader would read.

And that's the exact problem that Denton, belatedly, sought to address in the instant message that provided Salkin with his lede. He seems to have realized that Gawker needs a renewed focus, even if it means putting a governor on the site's growth rate. Since taking over as editor at the start of the year, he's been publishing actual media gossip of interest to few outside New York*. It hasn't all been first-rate, and I suspect his readers are a good deal less interested in the financial press than he is, but it's a necessary corrective.

The question now is whether a better Gawker can eventually be a bigger Gawker, or whether Denton, in the interest of keeping it from flying apart altogether, will have to accept the lower traffic and find his growth elsewhere. Considering the success he's had with Jezebel, the latter scenario would not be too painful and probably even welcomed by Gawker's hyper-possessive commenters.

Read Simon Dumenco's take on Gawker's evolution here.

[Disclosure: At various times in the past, I've shared some of the views above with Denton in the context of informal job discussions.]

*I had written that Gawker had taken "Manhattan" out of its motto, but I was wrong -- it's still in the page title.

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