Posts Tagged ‘Gawker’

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Yahoo!’s Bid for Hulu in $600M to $800M Range (AllThingsD)
According to numerous sources close to the situation, Yahoo! has bid from $600 million to $800 million for the premium video site Hulu. The reason for the wide range is due to the fact that the Silicon Valley Internet giant — similar to most bidders in the new effort to acquire Hulu — has proposed several different prices based on a variety of circumstances. That includes the length of the licensing rights for content and how much control the programming companies selling Hulu have over their media. BuzzFeed Other companies reportedly bidding for Hulu include: Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, former News Corp president Peter Chernin, private equity firm Guggenheim Partners, where former Yahoo! interim CEO Ross Levinsohn now resides and talent agency William Morris Endeavor in partnership with SilverLake Partners. TechCrunch One of the biggest questions that any bidder will face as it considers buying Hulu is what content rights the company will have and for how long. Since its founding, Hulu has famously had exclusive access to content from three of the four major broadcast networks. But it’s become increasingly clear that exclusivity is probably not in the best interests of Fox, ABC or NBC. Quartz / Christopher Mims By contrast with Tumblr, there is nothing exciting about buying Hulu. The video site’s current owners are a bunch of utterly traditional media companies that provide much of the video for it, including Walt Disney, Comcast, NBCUniversal and News Corp. But Hulu has 4 million subscribers — double the number just a year ago — who pay $7.99 per month each. That’s due entirely to Hulu’s ability to strike deals with various US television networks, including ABC, Fox, NBC and CBS, for their current shows and/or libraries of old episodes. Throw in advertising revenue, and the site brought in $695 million in 2012.

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Cord Jefferson‘s first day as Gawker’s west coast contributing editor generated some breaking (and obvious) news – - Cord Jefferson is black and diversity hasn’t been a priority in the past for the website:

One other note: I’m going to be only the second black person with a full-time salary at Gawker in its nearly 10-year history (the first is Caity Weaver, who is half black). I’m actually pretty excited about that fact, and I know from talking to a few of my new colleagues that they are, also. I don’t think this means you should expect Gawker to drastically change its overall coverage and voice, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that the people who complained about the Gawker masthead’s dearth of color weren’t complaining to deaf ears. And now that I’m here, I’m not going to stop until this place is as black as Obama’s cabinet, which is to say just a little bit more black.

While his race should have been obvious to everyone outside of Stevie Wonder (though I do get mistaken for Dominican in parts of New York), what nobody knew was Jefferson is only the second black staffer at Gawker in  their 10-year (!) history.

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It’s clear that using the word “nigga” in a post didn’t exactly help Seth Abramovitch‘s career at Gawker. But A.J. Daulerio, the site’s new editor, felt the need to write his own blog post explaining that was not what got Abramovitch fired. Or not the only thing. From Gawker:

To mitigate some of the damage done to his professional reputation as a result of my ill-timed public dismissal of him, I’d like to reiterate here that there were other factors before and after this DONDA mess which led to it. I thought it was a shitty joke and some of the attempts to defuse the backlash were shittier, but that shouldn’t in any way tarnish his excellent body of work, which I’ve always admired.

That’s nice of Daulerio to say, but we have to wonder – Was it his conscience, or fear of a lawsuit, that prompted this post? Abramovitch’s firing was handled poorly and publicly, with Daulerio even going so far as to make disparaging remarks about the departing blogger to the press.

In a post about Kanye West‘s new company DONDA, Seth Abramovitch joked that the name was an acronym for “Dis Original Nigga Dresses Aight.” Writing those words got Abramovitch fired from Gawker.

Granted, with a name like Seth Abramovitch, you really shouldn’t be throwing around the n-word, even as a joke. Even if that joke is about something a rapper might say, one who uses the n-word regularly. That being said, is this really a firing offense? From a website that once posted a graphic photo of a murder victim for the world and his grieving family to see? The blogger who posted that photo still works for Gawker, by the way, making this seem like a pretty arbitrary application of ethical standards.

But it could also signal a shift at Gawker. Abramovitch appears to have been canned by the site’s new editor, A.J. Daulerio, who may be intent on bringing higher moral standards to the website. Or he may just be playing into political correctness. Time will tell.

On the morning of October 25 in New York, a 21-year-old kid named Christopher Jusko was brutally attacked in the hallway of an East Village apartment building. He was stabbed in the neck and back, stumbled down two flights of stairs and onto the sidewalk, where he collapsed and died.

By that afternoon, Gawker had published a picture of Jusko’s bloody corpse lying dead on the sidewalk. The image wasn’t particularity newsworthy; no other news outlets reporting on the murder ran it. There was no original reporting and barely any accompanying text by the post’s author, Hamilton Nolan. But the image was graphic, sensationalist, and extremely offensive to the family of the deceased. They, along with many readers, complained for 5 days before Gawker editor Remy Stern finally relented and removed it from the site.

The obvious question is, why publish an image so gruesome and disturbing, and of questionable significance? The answer, of course, is page hits.
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We here at FBLA don’t want to tread on blogger territory too harshly, but we only bring up Gawker‘s “scoop” on Anna Wintour‘s departure from Vogue as good example of listening to the wrong people — and then reporting it.

When Wintour herself declines any comment and Conde Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse openly proclaims: “This is the silliest rumor I ever heard,” it makes you take pause.

Now, far be it from us to complain of the sorry standards for editing or regulation concerning blogs in the U.S. But we think some attention must be paid to outright mistakes that crop on blogs in general. For all of us writers on papers and mags out there, this was usually left to these nocturnal creatures called Copy Editors.

But in this Wild West universe of the blog, it falls on the writers to police themselves. That’s a dangerous precedent and it’s one that needs minding. We may not have the right answer, but we know it needs to be considered.

In fact the only reason we here on the Left Coast are even writing about it is the uncanny parallel to the successful indie film, “The Devil Wears Prada.”

We actually thought if it actually were true, then life would truly be imitating art. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Sharon Waxman takes aim at Snarker-in-chief Nick Denton (which we get) as well as the flight of talented journalists to the Internet (which we don’t get).

As she says:

“And while I’m at it, let me publicly lament the flight of
talented colleagues, Jeff Leeds of the Times and Gabriel Snyder, once of Variety, to the world of celebrity infotainment, and the kingdom of snark, respectively. Leeds, one of the best music journalists working (or, rather, not working) has gone to Buzznet, where he will be the editor-in-chief. Snyder becomes managing editor at Gawker. Like other journalists, they have to eat, so one can hardly blame them. But their joining the world of lowest-common-denominator-clicks makes those of us seekers in the world of information-that-matters the poorer.”

Is it really impossible to think that journalists like Leeds and Snyder could elevate the level of journalism at these sites? Whose snarky now?

Our sister site, Agency Spy has an interview today with Gawker‘s Nick Denton about the recent layoffs, hires and rehires. One of the most interesting aspects of the Gawker changes has been Denton finding a replacement for himself as managing editor.

As Agency Spy has it:

Matt: On your managing editor replacement, Gabriel Snyder; Why have you chosen to replace yourself? Gabriel has an independent attitude/style. How involved to you plan to be in editorial?

Denton: I felt I’d done my job. Monthly pageviews on Gawker.com have gone from 8m in December to 24m last month. And I’d announced after Labor Day that I was finally looking for a replacement. My tenure was supposed to be much shorter! And I have just a few other responsibilities.

We expect Old Media stalwarts like Business Week to come late to the party, but Gawker? Aren’t you guys supposed to have your “witty” retort at the ready before anyone has even said anything?

A week after we reported that the Orange County Register would be moving copy editing jobs to India, Gawker claims to act surprised by the news. As if.

Our sister blog, Fishbowl NY, wakes up a lot earlier than us. It also works harder than we do, smiles less often and wears more black. But that’s beside the point.

FBNY has all the scoop about the Gawker sales, including this quote from Nick Denton “To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.”

Check it out here.