Nieman Foundation at Harvard
By now you’ll have heard that after 14 years, Gawker.com will publish no more. Univision, the new owner of Gawker.com’s sibling sites, likely decided it didn’t want to deal with the Gawker Media flagship’s baggage. Gawker’s writers are being folded into other sites like Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Jezebel, or into other parts of Univision (though there’s no guarantee many of them will want to stay).
Fuck it https://t.co/rEfhHGJosG pic.twitter.com/0xlRW0KN0q
— Gawker (@Gawker) August 22, 2016
Gawker’s head of data and analytics Josh Laurito shared a post today with some numbers on Gawker.com as of Sunday morning (with the caveat that the site began publishing before reliable web analytics software, and that the metrics include stories from cityfile.com, which Gawker acquired in 2010).
Its most frequently covered topics concerned media (another caveat: due to misspellings and other tagging errors, actual numbers are probably higher):
In its lifetime, Gawker.com published 202,370 posts (3,311 were automated White House pool reports). A lucky 420 people (including groups and bots) have contributed posts to Gawker.com and its sub-blogs, with site veteran Hamilton Nolan topping the most-prolific list at 14,286 posts. (Nick Denton himself ranks No. 22 on that list.)
At its publishing peak in 2008, Gawker.com was publishing over 70 posts per day. Laurito’s explanation for that peak, and its subsequent decline:
This ludicrous posting rate came at the tail end of the housing boom. By the end of that year, with the market starting to tank, Gawker laid off about 15% of its editorial staff. The decrease in headcount, plus a change in traffic patterns away from direct, homepage traffic, decreased the ability and incentive to post as frequently. The fact that Gawker stopped paying writers per post sometime around this time might have had an impact as well. By 2012 the site posted just under 10,000 times, or less than half the rate of 3 years earlier.
6 comments:
Instead of praising or remembering Gawker with nostalgia and rose colored glasses, Journalists should be holding a Nuremberg trial and Truth and Reconciliation committee to determine what to do with editors, publishers, journalists that “graduated” from Gawker and the many many other hypocrites that would link and source Gawker with one hand while wagging their fingers at it with another.
IF you dislike what happened in court, the first people to blame are Journalists. Not the jury, judge, or Thiel.
YOU.
The First Amendment IS socially constructed. Whenever you shelter yourself within it, consider how your behaviors could cause it to be changed.
Gawker’s doxing, bullying, outing, blackmailing, defaming goes on YOU at Nieman Lab and J-School Teachers and their Deans everywhere.
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