Gawker Media: blog, popular y rentable

Desde que en 2002 Gizmodo dio el punto de partida a Gawker Media (un grupo de blogs revisteriles que apuntan a los medios y la farándula) que la compañía no ha dejado de crecer: hoy maneja 12 blogs distribuidos por todo Estados Unidos, suman 29 millones de visitas únicas, más de 200 millones de pages views y recibe alrededor de US$150 millones anuales. La fórmula de su creador, Nick Denton, es simplemente llevar el negocio de las revistas a la web. Su equipo de trabajo no tiene ni una sola diferencia con un grupo editorial: publishers, directores editoriales, productores de contenido y un excelente equipo de ventas. La gran diferencia, es que los costos de Denton son apenas el 30% de lo que desembolsa la industria tradicional. Por otro lado, sus blogs son muy criticados por el tratamiento poco riguroso de la mayoría de sus notas. Se le acusa de mentir, manipular, usar fuentes anónimas y no chequear la información que publica. George Clooney definió Gawker como "una cosa peligrosa". Más allá si lo es o no, ha creado un modelo de estudio, que se sale de los parámetros a los que debiera aspirar un medio tradicional y de prestigio, pero que sin embargo tiene un éxito en la audiencia que obviamente abre un interesante debate. Acá un artículo de la revista N + 1.

Por Carla Blumenkranz
Nplus Artículo
New York gossip website Gawker was launched in 2002 by an internet entrepreneur and a naïf new to the city—Professor Henry Higgins and his Eliza Doolittle. Founder Nick Denton, a former Financial Times reporter, had helped start the early social networking site First Tuesday, which arranged for web and media entrepreneurs to go for drinks together. Elizabeth Spiers, the 25-year-old writer he hired, was a recent New York arrival who had kept a blog about her life in finance. It's hard to believe that at first Gawker, which we now know for "knowing everything" about local media and celebrity culture, didn't even know what to read. But in her very first posts (from March 2002), Spiers writes blurbs to herself about what she's read or should be reading. Flavorpill.com is "cultural stimuli in New York"; New York is a "fluffy, bitchy city magazine"; and the New York Observer is "the print inspiration for Gawker, a pink-paged broadsheet designed for the Upper East Side elite."

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Lists like this usually only exist in the notebooks of young people who come to the city intent on figuring it out. Spiers, who grew up in Alabama, attended Duke, and then started her career in San Francisco, made her notebooks public. She was not bored by any piece of information about New York. In her first few months as Gawker, she showed a disarming interest in maps of Manhattan (one, for instance, identified all the Wi-Fi users); she linked to New Yorker pieces she liked; and she strenuously objected to an alleged Tupperware party trend, as reported in the Times Style section. "Please tell me this Tupperware thing is intentionally ironic so I can stop banging my head against the wall and screaming," she wrote. Spiers, who was from a small town and probably knew from Tupperware, couldn't seem to stand the idea that, in the city, you might not get to throw everything away.