Mediabistro.com reports on the launch of a new spin-off site for Gawker – a video website, Gawker.TV, manned by around 16 interns working under a video editor.

Videos are a big traffic driver for Gawker and founder Nick Denton has admitted that selling ads will be easier on a site with a less specific focus, according to Mediabistro.

Full post at this link…

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Last week Gawker asked readers to help it translate an article into Russian from Conde Nast’s GQ, which the publisher reportedly went to great lengths to prevent from being read in Russia, because it contained criticisms of Vladimir Putin.

A full translation of the article has been completed and the process behind it can be read about at this link.

Issues of copyright and press freedom arise from this – Journalism.co.uk will be contacting Gawker to find out more.

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Over at the Reuters blog, Felix Salmon does some calculations about Gawker and blog profitability, following a post on the Nieman Journalism Lab.

“(…) overall it’s easy to see how Gawker has now grown to the point at which it’s a highly profitable media company.”

Full post at this link…

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Well, that’s Ian Shapira’s suggested headline for a follow-up story on Gawker, after the site picked up on and heavily excerpted his story on ‘branding consultant’ Anne Loehr.

Gawker included a link to his original article – but only at the very bottom of the post.

Shapira’s initial happiness at having his story featured on Gawker turned to disillusion as he questioned the benefits of traffic driven by Gawker to his original piece, he writes in a follow-up piece.

Gawker may make money from advertising around its aggregation of original reporting from other sources, which have invested time and money into the report, but does a spike in traffic help the Washington Post’s bottom line, he asks.

“After talking with Denton [Nick Denton, Gawker founder], Nolan [Hamilton Nolan, the Gawker author] and others for this article, I still want a fluid blogosphere, but one where aggregators – newspapers included – are more transparent about whom they’re heavily excerpting. They should mention the original source immediately. And if bloggers want to excerpt at length, a fee would be the nice, ethical gesture,” he writes.

Full article at this link…

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The plunge has already been pretty terrifying for a range of companies from Yahoo and IAC to the newspapers,” writes Gawker founder Nick Denton, referring to his previous prediction that media companies should prepare for a 40 per cent downturn in advertising revenue over the economic cycle.

“But I was wrong in one respect: a few premium internet brands, Gawker’s among them, have withstood the advertising apocalypse.”

Full post at this link…

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From Politico: a report on a panel at the Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colarado, asking ‘What’s the News Worth to You?’

For us Brits, this is the interesting part:

“During the panel’s Q&A, Gawker Media’s Nick Denton sarcastically thanked the American newspaper industry for being so unaggressive, making it possible for ‘thugs’ like him to succeed.

“Conversely, Denton said he’d never set up shop in England. ‘Every single day, those editors get up and try to kill each other,’ said Denton. Not so in the U.S.”

(Hat-tip: Martin Stabe)

.

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You know how media companies get a hard time for how they treat the ‘workies’? Especially because most internships are unpaid – you might get expenses if you’re lucky. Well, Huffington Post has gone one step futher, by putting up an internship for charity auction – offering bidders the chance to ‘jumpstart their career in the blogosphere’. Ten bids had been placed at the time of writing; the last one was for $13,000. All proceeds go to the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights.

• Gawker’s take on the HuffPo lot at this link…
  
• Interesting spot from the past: Anya Kamenetz writing at HuffPo in 2006 on ‘the high cost of unpaid internships’:
  “Now you see businesses of all sizes taking on interns, openly for the free labor. I have been at & heard of publications & publishers where they save the slush pile all year for the summer interns to go through. And Gawker, which doesn’t pay its own interns, loves to post job ads wherein well-paid magazine editors, artists, and others seek full-time assistants for free.”

It reminds Journalism.co.uk of prizes offered in the the Independent’s annual charity auctions. In those, you bid to hang out with the Indy’s editors, correspondents and columnists (yes, people coughed up good money to hang out with the likes of Street-Porter, Emin and Kelner), and the lucky victors (a couple listed below) once got to spend a whole day at the office!

Mr Vogels was a lucky winner in 2003:

Lot 1: Hold the Front Page
Ever wondered how a daily newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works from morning conference to the nail-biting deadline. Meet the staff and marvel at their cool professionalism, creative brilliance and unusual fashion sense.
Winning bid: £1,750, Frederik Vogels, London.

And Amar enjoyed a similar pleasure in 2005:

Lot 1: A Day at the Paper Ever wondered how a daily national newspaper gets put together? Come and see how it works for one exciting day, hearing the news agenda at morning conference, watching the tension build as the deadline hour approaches. Meet the glamorous staff and marvel at their camaraderie and coolness under pressure. Winning bid: amar, £2,251.11. (Last year’s winning bid: £1,101)

Any more examples? Add them below.

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Defamer is being absorbed into Gawker, but what’s happenning to its writers?

The NYTimes takes a quick look at the reopening MovieLine website, the new home of Defamer’s editors and writers.

“Whenever it is time to leave those [gossip] sites, though, the mocking writers often seem to have a change of heart as they try to change their jobs,” Stephanie Clifford comments.

“The editor and writers at Defamer, the Gawker Media site, have taken a similar turn.”

Full story at this link…

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So Boris might give out Blackberries (well, ‘blackberry-type gizmos’) to Olympics spectators in 2012, but over in the States Wall Street Journal journalists are finding that their technology allowance is being cut back.

Or so this ‘internal memo’ on Gawker.com would have us believe. Is it for real? Apparently, all WSJ news staff have been told that a new money-saving measure is in place: ‘at its core is the concept of “one person/one machine.’

“If you are an office-based editor, you’ll get a new desktop. If you are a reporter or editor who travels on assignment, you’ll get a new laptop with a docking station, keyboard and monitor for office use.”

That’s what the alleged internal memo reads. Comments below the Gawker article are sceptical: surely the typos in the memo are a bigger story than the computer cuts, writes ‘drunkexpatworker’.

Hmmm. Authentic or not? It seems an odd kind of prank if not: it wasn’t that funny.

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