Gawker Kills the Blog As We've Known It, Using Christopher Lee As Its Weapon
It's been an interesting week at Nick Denton's Gawker Media empire, both on the front-end, and behind-the-scenes. The company -- whose last great scoop was uncovering that iPhone 4 prototype on its Gizmodo blog (unless you count this Mark Sanchez thing) -- this week unseated Representative Christopher Lee, a Republican Congressman who had been representing western New York.
The Congressman's resignation, which is immensely satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way, also helped the crafty Denton prove a point: that a controversial redesign of Gawker he launched earlier in the week, was, in fact, a good idea -- no matter what the naysayers said.
The redesign de-emphasized the central layout concept of blogs -- that the posts are always in reverse chronological order -- in favor of having Gawker sites actually feature the most important content in the most prominent location, with big pictures (see above). In other words, Gawker's blogs are now borrowing a central idea from the traditional sites and print vehicles they have worked to unseat. Changing the interface becomes important when a scoop like the Gizmodo one gets lost in the stream by run-of-the-mill posts like how to install Spotify on your iPhone if you live in the U.S.
Gawker unveiled the redesign on Monday, dealing with the usual mass protest that accompanies virtually all media redesigns. On Wednesday, it started the ball rolling on what became the resignation of the Congressman, which neatly played into Denton's assertion that the standard blog layout no longer did justice to the content. It is every day that Lindsay Lohan gets herself in trouble; it isn't every day that Gawker, or any other site, gets the chance to exclusively publish a picture of a shirtless, married Congressman, that he sent to a woman he encountered on Craigslist. Surely, this story was going to have legs, and the new Gawker layout had the support to hold it up, for as long as the story played out. (That the Congressman resigned within hours of the posting of the picture must have been one of Gawker's, and Denton's, most delicious moments ever.)
And there the story stayed for most of the next two days, accompanied, eventually, by posts on the resignation, and an exclusive interview of the woman who sent Gawker the picture in the first place. While the most recent post got the most play, three-quarters or so of the home page stayed devoted to the misadventures of now ex-Rep. Lee. This caused Denton to tweet earlier today: "And that's why news sites have front pages."
It's fun to speculate about how long Gawker might potentially have held the story so it could unleash it after the redesign. The email exchanges between the woman and Lee happened in mid-January, and Gawker doesn't say when the woman gave them the story. But, actually, that's not the point. The real discussion is about whether Gawker's redesign -- amplified, either intentionally or not, by a great exclusive during the same week -- spells the end of major blogs as we've known them. Many, many blogs, from TMZ.com to TechCrunch, still use the reverse chronological order blog layout, but as major media sites in their own right, it is probably time to ditch the interface, even if the back-end efficiencies of letting reporters post, write headlines, throw in visuals and embed video should remain.
So, if we see other major blogs doing the same thing, we'll have two people to thank: Nick Denton and unemployed former legislator, Christopher Lee. Oh, and maybe Mark Sanchez.
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