Gawker Chief: ‘Original Reporting Will Be Rewarded’
Q&A: Gawker Media Founder Nick Denton — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad.
Context & Ripple Effects
Denton built Gawker Media into the template for traffic-driven blogging, and by January 2008 he had formalized it with a plan to pay bloggers based on traffic. That same month the New York Times asked whether the network had lost its edge, following a December 2007 editor change at the flagship site.
In this AdAge Q&A, the man who spent last fall among the loudest voices forecasting media-industry collapse concedes that spring 2009 has been kinder than his predictions — and responds by promising that original reporting will be rewarded, a notable pivot for a publisher whose economics were built on pageview volume.
First-order effects
- Gawker's own writers see the incentive calculus shift: after a year-plus of traffic-based pay under Denton, scoop-getting rather than post-count becomes the stated path to reward.
- Denton's surprise at surviving the downturn gives him room to spend — the collapse he forecast did not arrive on schedule, so austerity no longer dictates editorial policy.
Second-order effects
- Rival blog networks that copied Gawker's pageview-compensation model now face pressure from its inventor to compete on exclusives instead of volume, raising their cost base or ceding credibility.
- If Gawker starts paying for original stories, sources and freelancers gain an alternative outlet willing to pay cash, tightening the market for scoop material against legacy outlets that have frozen budgets.
Third-order effects
- A public recanting by the most prominent advocate of traffic-based pay weakens the pageview orthodoxy across online publishing, pushing the industry toward hybrid metrics that value distinctiveness over raw clicks.
- The long-running blog-versus-journalism distinction erodes further if the leading blog network funds reporting, forcing legacy outlets to justify themselves on speed and brand rather than access to reporting alone.
The trend: Blog publishers are beginning to move beyond raw traffic metrics toward editorial distinctiveness as the advertising downturn proves shallower than feared.