Newsier Gawker Looks Beyond Manhattan

Denton: Media site 'may inadvertently commit journalism'
By Jason Farago,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 22, 2009 7:36 AM CDT
Newsier Gawker Looks Beyond Manhattan
Nick Denton, Gawker's founder, tells the Washington Post that 'we don't seek to do good.'   (Flickr)

Gawker.com began life as a gossip site for the New York media industry, but these days the site is increasingly looking away from incestuous Manhattan—it's covering everything from reality TV to global politics, and recently the site hired an actual investigative reporter. Nick Denton, the site's founder, tells Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post that the tone is changing, if begrudgingly. "We may inadvertently commit journalism," he says. "That is not the institutional intention."

Gawker isn't Denton's most popular site, but traffic has climbed considerably as the site's interests have broadened. Denton calls blogging an "exhausting business"—and one former editor says Denton's "insanely bored" now that Gawker's no longer the feisty upstart. "He wants to know who's sleeping with whom," says Choire Sicha. "He doesn't care about any of the stuff they write now." (More media stories.)

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