I built this website. From scratch. Including the servers.
"This was just how the media industry worked, Denton said, and if Gawker writers did not realize that, it was only because he had gone out of his way to insulate them from advertiser pressure.
"There are dirty deals being done all over the place," he said. "Your attitude, your naïveté when it comes to that and then outrage when you discover that actually that’s how the world works, it’s sort of natural and it’s sort of a function of where we are as a company."
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/07/8572584/gawker-tax-getting-too-high-denton-tells-his-staff
At this point, the trainwreck is so spectacular, it feels like it's a Hollywood screenplay (and I bet it brings eyeballs).
Gawker's features editor, Leah Finnegan, live tweeted her commentary on a meeting between the staff and management. Examples: "Complete horseshit" , " 'garble garble garble' -nick" and the final "this has been gawker all-hands meeting livetweets. please DM me for resume."
https://archive.is/hIjEV
^The above twitter feed should be her resumé. Who wants to hire someone who sarcastically livetweets commentary on an all hands on deck company meeting?
It's also interesting how differently the editors & writers perceive the brand so differently from the founder & board.
AdAge: http://adage.com/article/media/top-gawker-editors-resign-denton-defends-pulling-article/299560/
"Mr. Denton tried to put a bow on the situation, arguing that the site's writers will have to get used to publishing not only truths but truths that are interesting and worthwhile. "
I wonder what part of Hulk Hogans sextape was "interesting and worthwhile"?
Heya Steve! I marinated my brain in rosé when we were dining in Cannes, but I'm pretty sure we discussed this topic then too. Whomever decided to pay by the eyeball started us down this slope, greased up by greed.
And they have the gall to call us the evil ones. Like I just explained to my daughter, advertising is the only communication that it is illegal to lie in. Everything we put out there has been vetted by legal teams thrice. You can't say the same for the evening news where they claimed the Asiana pilot name was "Captain Sum Tin Wong".
Like you said, If we want this shit to stop, marketers have to stop funding it. - the social marketing trend has already birthed at least ten new awards, now lets move on to the the social media buying. Place your ads in quality media dear brands, not magazines that print disturbing and entirely false rape stories that bring a fraternity down, or websites that are blackmail tools for a presumably deranged Texan porn star.
That's exactly it though, what Lucia Moses touches on is correct "the threshold has gotten higher", and indeed it has. For the past ten years media places like Gawker have flourished, and so have their standards. Now, everyone was OK with the standards being brought down as long as the eyeballs came to town, but how long can this fall really continue? How long do you want your carefully vetted, legally checked, thrice, brand - next to a blog post written by an intern who gets $12 per post and still thinks Mao & Che are the coolest people?
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