Nick Denton writes on Gawker:
I am, says Jacob Weisberg, doing a "Cheney" — heading the search committee for a new managing editor of Gawker, and choosing myself. Thanks for that. Yes, Brian Stelter had the story right. The site won’t change much: it will remain focused on media gossip and pop culture; Alex Pareene will blog the breaking news; Maggie Shnayerson will continue to embarrass the magazine industry and permalancer-abusing media conglomerates such as Viacom; and Sheila McClear will cover book publishing. We’ll be adding some new contributors over the next few weeks. To begin: Richard Morgan, who’ll focus on the TV networks; Nick Douglas, a Gawker Media veteran, as our early warning antenna for Youtube clips and other pop culture phenomena on the web; Richard Lawson, better known as the commenter lolcait, will be running the site’s new photo caption contest. Oh, and there’s a surprise guest, this afternoon at 2pm, in the comments. After the jump, other new year changes at Gawker’s sibling titles, if you’re interested.
It’s Gawker Media’s anal side: we like to make changes in a neat package. As well as my own promotion, there are new managing editors at two other titles; and there’s a new site launching today. At Wonkette, the political gossip site, by popular demand, the legendary Ken Layne is back, this time as managing editor. And, at Defamer, Gawker’s entertainment gossip title, Mark Graham is coming in as managing editor.
Mark Lisanti, the site’s founding editor and one of the best writers on the web, will remain. But Defamer’s expanding, into celebrity photos and video clips, and original reporting. So we’re hiring the site’s first managing editor. Mark Graham, who’ll take over the administration of the operation, was a manager at Viacom. More importantly, he’s an old-school blogger, creator of Whatevs, one of the first pop culture blogs.
And the one last bullet point to this company press release: Annalee Newitz, a contributor to Wired among many other publications, is helming Gawker’s new science fiction and futurist culture site, io9, which launches today. It’s unashamedly geeky, but lavishly illustrated. Click through, if only for the pictures, like this one below, of a solar eruption, captured by an amateur astronomer.
…Big Head DC recently noted (twice) that Clarke had started freelancing for Radar, a chief competitor to Denton’s blogs. Within days of those revelations, Clarke was out at Wonkette. That a second editor has left Denton to work for Radar (the first was Alex Balk) surely must be a stinging slap in Denton’s face, especially considering the mass quitting of three of his top editors at Gawker in December. Each of those editors took jabs on the Gawker blog about Denton’s poor management style in the weeks prior to their departures.
Interestingly, Ken Layne, who had run the Wonkette blog with Alex Pareene for a majority of 2006 and 2007 – and who was asked to leave the blog by Denton when Clarke signed up – has temporarily filled the open position. Pareene left to join Gawker’s NYC-focused blog soon after Big Head DC revealed his involvement in a Washington sex scandal.
As for Clarke, problems started soon into his tenure. A source close to the situation says Clarke didn’t realize the amount of posting he’d be expected to do, nor did he understand the extent of Denton’s desire for fresh and original scoops to be broken via the blog. Denton’s demands for scoops similar to mainstream media outlets have become much more intense as of late as some of his blogs, including Wonkette, have lost audience share and ad revenue to competing outlets such as Big Head DC.
