Good question. Ah readers, it seems I’ve encountered that phenomenon known as “Blogger Burnout". It happens to the best of us. Unfortunately this bout of Blogger Burnout is also accompanied with a strong case of “Year End Work Overload” making strongly unlikely that anything worth reading will be posted here before January.
Plus, I heard Krucoff went to Israel. If the #1 New York Blogger leaves New York, what is left for the rest of us?
For all the doubters out there, SAC does exist. I tried to photograph him but unfortunately my camera exploded once his being entered the frame, so I have no photographic evidence.
Holy crap, it’s finally happened. Rafat Ali at Paid Conten has reported that Weblogs Inc. has been purchased by AOL, and Jason Calacanis and Co. could receive $20-$35 million if WIN reaches certain goals. It’s not clear whether this sale includes Weblogs Inc’s blog publishing platform Blogsmith. Wonder if it’s a coincidence that this rumor has been confirmed to Paid Content just one day after Gawker Media announced Gizmodo’s venture into Europe. Nick’s little licensing plan won’t get much coverage this week up against the news that one of the two major players in blogland has been bought. Genius move Jason, leaking the story now. Genius!
Update: Nick Denton responds, saying Gawker Media’s not for sale and that it’s way too early for consolidation.
Gawker Media announced yesterday that they are partnering up with VNU, a “leading global information and media company” to publish international versions of Gizmodo, their gadget blog. Gizmodo will be translated and tailored for Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. This is a licensing agreement where Gizmodo provides their original content and VNU provides the translation and the local content. Interestingly a few months ago Jason Calacanis announced a similar international strategy with Engadget, WIN’s gadget blog. However WIN decided against licensing their content, which Calacanis explains here:
We had offers to licenses our content of course, but I felt that we should keep ownership of it for now and try to build a global brand which has never really been done in media. Most folks (think MTV, Playboy, etc) just license their brands. The local versions have little to do with the motherships. I prefer the model of our editor Peter Rojas working with my old friend Jason Chiang to create content from the US to China, but more importantly from China to the US.
So, do the international versions of Engadget (Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish) sound like their American cousin? Do the Europpean versions of Gizmodo bear any semblance to the original? Unfortunately we don’t really speak any foreign languages (damn insufficient Penn language requirements!) so the only comparison we can make is between original Gizmodo and British Gizmodo. It seems some posts are virtually identical on both sites (compare this post to this post). However this post on a sunglasses MP3 player is completely different in UK version. Why? Too many American pop culture references - mullets, Debbie Gibson, etc. Their little cockney heads would explode having ingest all that American-ness.
Which approach is better? Jason’s way he (and Peter Rojas) keep control of the content. However hiring and paying for translators and local writers is an awful lot of work. Nick’s way requires less investment by Gawker but could end up (horror of horrors) diluting the brand. But Kinja already did that, right? (rim shot)
In Tom Scocca’s Off the Record column this week he profiled Nick Denton and Gawker Media. In the article the Gawker Media queen-in-chief described all his current and former employees as being “misfit[s] of some sort", and he then went on to name some of their psychoses in detail. Now that we have these descriptions, there’s only one thing to do: Let’s play Guess the Gawker Employee! We’ll throw in our ideas, you add yours to the comments below.
“rumored to have been fired …for being high on the job” - Ana Marie Cox? She often writes (humorously) about drinking on the job, maybe she smoked too?
“never went to college” - Choire Sicha? - He’s written about being an outsider in high school - maybe he ran away to New York right after prom?
“only wears 1960s clothes” - ???? - We’ve met most of the GM writers, so we’re surprised that we haven’t noticed this.
“notoriously unemployable” - Krucoff quit Gridskipper and didn’t show up for FishbowlNY a few weeks later, giving him an unemployable reputation, but we’ve heard this about Ana Marie Cox too.
Vote early and often.
That’s embarrassing.
Pizza recipes @ Slashfood’s pizza day… [Jason Calacanis]
Slashfood
Slashdot
Here’s blog-on-blog journalism at its best: David Hauslaib at Jossip unearthed Nick Denton’s Match.com profile yesterday. Nick is looking for man in the vicinity of New York City and he believes “nothing’s better than a quick-witted comeback". Now it’s not really right for bloggers to make fun of people with online personals - most internet types have both friends and enemies they’ve made online. But there’s one part of this story that David left out - how exactly did he find Nick’s profile? Has his relationship with Ben Widdicombe of the Daily News hit the rocks, prompting David to troll Match.com for a little man-love of his own? Developing…
Gawker Media is looking to add an “urban cartographer” to their team. They describe the ideal candidate as being “the person all your friends ask what the new hot restaurant is, or what happened to that boutique on 10th Street". It sounds as if Gawker is looking to close in on Curbed’s beat. Does this move towards more local coverage mean that Nick Denton has set his crosshairs on the Curbed empire in an effort to put his right hand man Lockhart Steele back in his place? Or is this the first step of the seemingly inevitable merger between Gawker Media and Curbed? A third even more intriguing possibility is that Google (and thus Google Maps) has chosen Gawker Media as its latest blog-world acquisition (Google has previously purchased Blogger and Dodgeball). This seems to be a serious endeavor into local coverage as it is listed as a full time freelance postition. Aspiring writers shouldn’t get too excited - a full time freelance position with Gawker Media means that you get paid moderately for 10 hours of daily work and then as a bonus you don’t get health insurance. But at least you get to hang out with the talking vodka martini.
Gawker Media finally got off it’s keister on Thursday and launched its long-awaited sports blog, Deadspin. Interestingly, its writer, Will Leitch of The Black Table, has been logging posts there since May. After speaking to Gawker Media’s talking vodka martini mascot we learned that the launch was delayed because Will was tied up with other projects and because of several Gawker Media administrative issues: the GM team had difficulty coming up with a name, they wanted to wait for football season, and Jessica and Jesse staged a sit-in against Gay Gawker Media launching a sports blog. We can’t say too much about the content as we’re not exactly rabid sports fans but Will Leitch is an all-around funny guy so surely this site will enhance the average male’s enjoyment of fantasy football. However, the header looks very similar to Oddjack’s - is Gawker Media going for a corporate look?
Gawker also redesigned Sploid, its news site. So far the redesign has gotten pretty bad reviews: Of the redesign Krucoff says, “NEWS BLOG SHITS ITS PANTS, WIPES THE SCREEN". While that comment is a bit extreme, if a site design looks so screwed up that you have to reload the site several times to see if it really looks like that, then there’s probably something wrong. The idea to show many stories at once with the small block view is a good one, but this implementation of it doesn’t seem to work. Towards the bottom of the page there are empty spaces and it looks as if the page isn’t loading correctly. We also can’t find the archives - can anyone else? The readers of Sploid seem to also dislike the redesign. Will Nick Denton pull the design back? Will someone explain what “Deadspin” means? Will that Vodka martini stop talking to us?!? So. many. questions.
Andrew Krucoff has been up to some serious sleuthing lately. He discovered that Stephanie Klein, blogging It-Girl and plaintiff in a plagirism suit, is a plagarizer herself. Klein (or her publishing company, Regan Books) threatened to sue parody blog Tale of Two Sisters a few weeks ago. ToTS has moved off of Blogger to Typepad and have continued the hilarity, thank God. However, at the same time Krucoff uncovered that Stephanie Klein lifted a few lines from a children’s storytelling exercise in a June 2004 post. Klein has since changed the post, closed the comments, added a quasi-apology to the post, and closed the site to robots thus clearing the cached version of the page. Klein’s quck deletion of the offending lines and slow additon of the apology (sounds like a Scot McClellan move, doesn’t it?) prompted the plagarized author, Gerald Fierst, to respond:
I think apologizing has become a bit too common a formula for politicians and journalists and celebrities. ‘Fessing up and being more careful in the future is fine, but the appreciation of the work of others (even those who satirize and trivialize you - which in a way you did to me) is more important.
Burn! Nothing hurts more than a classy zing.
