Has it even (dare we say it?) "jumped the shark"? Or is Gawker like Saturday Night Live, in a trough period, but set to rebound?
There are certainly signs that Gawker, delivering a daily dose of gossip and commentary about the news business and selected celebrities since 2002, is in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil, which has led to a slide in its once-hypnotic influence on the news media world.
Before the wave of staff departures at Gawker, New York magazine published an article ("Everybody Sucks") in October ascribing the site’s popularity to the resentment of the city’s “creative underclass,” and asked whether pandering to the nasty impulses of those who covet an increasingly rare slot among the news media establishment troubled the souls of Gawker’s writers.
N+1, a culture journal, followed with a thoroughly researched essay noting how Gawker’s voice has changed with successive editors, descending from a homespun blog that smartly sniped about editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour, whose prominence arguably opened them to sarcastic comment, to its current state as a cruel behemoth, eviscerating low-level editors and people’s children.
Through all of the years, changes in editorship and complaints about inaccuracies, traffic still grew. According to statistics available through a link on Gawker and older statistics provided by a former Gawker employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid Mr. Denton’s wrath, the site logged about 700,000 page views in August 2003, the last month of the founding editor, Elizabeth Spiers. A year later, there were 2.8 million pages views, which grew to 5.4 million in August 2005 and to almost 9 million in August 2006.
One thing was constant: many of those page views were being generated by members of the news media. As messy and mean as Gawker could be, it was an addiction to many journalists, obsessively clicking in search of the diversion that fresh gossip about colleagues and their bosses offered from the toil of reporting and editing the news.
The site saw a huge traffic drop, going to 8 million page views in December from 11 million in October. Some critics blame its increasingly skeevy nature. As examples, posts attacking peoples' children and a roundup of online scatological sex vids.
Publisher Nick Denton would prefer to think that it's the success of sister property Jezebel that's drawing traffic away.
(Founding Gawker editor Elizabeth) Spiers said that “current Gawker” is committing the Journalism 101 sin of doing too much telling and not enough showing. Saying that something is awful, she said, “is a poor substitute for an actual argument.”
Not everyone is sounding a death knell. The site will survive the current crisis as it has others, said Lockhart Steele, a former managing editor of Gawker Media. “It is always the case that Gawker is not what it used to be,” he said. “It started with this idea that Gawker was over when Liz Spiers left. It was ‘Oh, my God, she’s leaving.’ ”
Still Denton wrote the following in an e-mail when the site broke 470K page views one recent day.
“Not sure whether we can keep above 400k so regularly, but nice to see that the site can reach its former highs.”
And that might be another problem: Gawker is a nasty, skanky, turnover-ridden media gossip site that's matured.
It's pretty tough to keep doubling your audience from month to month as your site ages.