Goodbye Defamer As We Twitter Our Lives

AS a sign of how the live tree press is contracting, Defamer, the LA gossip rag, is merging into Gawker.

As the Hollywood gossip Web site Defamer.com prepared to cover the Academy Awards on Sunday, its owner, Gawker Media, said it would fold the site into its flagship blog, Gawker.com.

And so Gawker sets about becoming the online newspaper it always wanted to be. It knocks the so-called dead tress press, but sections work online and offline, right? (See Anorak.)

Defamer, which jabbed at celebrities and industry executives, will become Gawker.com’s entertainment column. Its editor, Seth Abramovitch, and Defamer’s main writers will leave the company this week. In December Gawker’s founder and president, Nick Denton, said he was in talks to sell Defamer, but those talks fell through, Mr. Abramovitch said. “There are so many other blogs covering what we’d cover,” he noted.

And that’s it. When everyone has their own blog - and everyone has published their opinions on Beyonce’s knickers - where’s the audience?

The new media starts talking to the new media.

And so the new media starts to ape the old media and we all twitter out heads off like pundits on our own lives…

Anorak

Posted: 24th, February 2009 | In: Media Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink