I’ve been watching the BloodCopy debacle for some time. BloodCopy is a new blog in the Gawker Media blog network, about vampired. Problem is, it is a big ad in itself, the whole blog is a HBO promo for the TV series True Blood.
There’s disclosure, hidden away in the Gawker Media footer. There’s no “sponsored post” text or anything. The campaign is, at the very least, balancing along the edge of what is deemed OK within the blogosphere.
We’d better get used to it. [Read more…]
The king of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, is featured in an interview over at Ad Age. Naturally, a lot of the focus is on advertising revenue and the fact that Denton doomed it last year, and then did well enough after all. While online revenue for a blog network like Gawker Media is interesting, this caught my eye:
If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much. That should be reassuring to people. The content market is finding its new balance. Original reporting will be rewarded.
Denton then goes on and talks about recent strategic hires to strengthen the voice of the network’s key titles. Content is king yet again, eh?
Double X is a new blog – sorry, web magazine – for women, or at least that’s what they’re aiming at, spun out of Slate blog The XX Factor. Jessica Grose, of Jezebel fame, is the managing editor, and she founded the new venture along with author Meghan O’Rourke and journalist Hanna Rosin.
Double X takes the Slate and XX Factor sensibility and applies it to sexual politics, fashion, parenting, health, science, sex, friendship, work-life balance, and anything else you might talk about with your friends over coffee. We tackle subjects high and low with an approach that’s unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending.
So says the about page, and while we’ll see how well this will be executed, chances are the founding trio, along with the rest of the staff, will manage well enough. After all, this isn’t the first blog they’re running.
If you’re a blog network like Gawker Media, mixing rumors and news with celebrity stalking and snarky commentary, you need a demo reel to go with it. Luckily, enough people have spoken out against the network blogs, and they have been featured in a fair share of popular culture TV shows (you missed the Californication Gawker mugshot, guys!) to make for an interesting video. [Read more…]
Or science at least, as you’ll find him on Popular Science from now on, incidentally his previous employer it seems. He’ll act as editor on the PopSci.com site, which should be an interesting gig. Check out the goodbye post on Gizmodo for space jokes and more.
