Gawker and Perez Hilton: When The New Media And Old Media Meet
GAWKER is a big hit online. The New York Times even covers its staffing matters:
In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.
Says Gould: “It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading… You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.”
New media sites become just like the so-called old media they feed off. The staff top and tail press releases and review gadgets, films and CDs, working on sites in the hope of scoring a job in the old media. Like the site Perez Hilton, run by a man who is now a bloated, self-aggrandizing Z-list celebrity of the type he should be castigating.
Says Gould: Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over. I would love it if it just fell off the face of the earth….I don’t want to say the meanest thing or the most shocking thing possible anymore, because it gets so old and so soul-killing. There is stuff I really care about. I’m not interested in tearing it down as much as describing it.”
Show and don’t tell. It’s what the best newspapers do. And the best sites…
Posted: 3rd, December 2007 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
