Gasp! Wonkette Is Sold!

Politico.com reports that Gawker Media’s Nick Denton is selling local blog Wonkette (as well as Gridskipper and Idolator). Why? “They each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.”

Around town, we always hear “Wonkette’s not what it used to be” but, to be fair, we’ve always heard that: We heard that when Ana Marie Cox was there (“not as funny as she used to be”), when Alex Pareene and David Lat took over (“not as funny as Wonkette used to be”) and also with the current leadership (again: “not as funny as it used to be”) so we’re not entirely sold on the “slippery slope” theory since we’ve pretty much always found it funny.

But Denton does take some subtle digs at the blog in his note (despite referring to “the record traffic of the last three months”), like: “We need to concentrate our energies, and the
time of Chris Batty’s sales group, on the sites with the greatest
potential for audience and advertising.”

So what of Wonkette?

WONKETTE is being spun off to the managing editor, Ken Layne, former
founder of one of the web’s very first news sites, Tabloid.net. The
title will become part of the Blogads network of political sites,
which includes Daily Kos, among others.

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