When Matthew Keys tweeted on Monday morning that he had been fired from his position as deputy social media editor at Reuters, speculation spread quickly on the Internet.
Mr. Keys, who last month was indicted for conspiring with the hacker group Anonymous to gain illegal access to the website of The Los Angeles Read More
“When someone comes into your house and throws shit around, you get pissed,” Anna Holmes told The Observer. She was speaking in metaphor: The house was the Gawker Media women’s interest blog Jezebel, of which she was the founding editor; the someone was the blog’s commenters, a famously undisciplined crowd.
“If you open your front door to people they just act like jerks,” agreed former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson. Now the managing editor of Animal NY, he favors abolishing comments sections altogether.
Blog proprietor Nick Denton has a different plan—he’s giving them the run of the place. The commenters are creating content, after all, just like the writers. What’s the difference?
“I want to erase this toxic Internet class system,” he told The Observer in a gmail chat.
“Nick has always loved to subtly and not so subtly insult his employees,” said Gawker writer John Cook. “He thinks of us as glorified commenters.” Read More
Longreads-approved website The Awl—run by Radar, Observer, and Gawker expats Alex Balk and Choire Sicha—is coming up on its third anniversary! Since they’ve launched, they’ve spun off three blogs from the mothership, general ladies’-interest site The Hairpin, comedy blog Splitsider, and most recently, gadget blog The Wirecutter.
And as of today, they’ve now launched a…Tumblr…radio station…of music videos, AwlMusic.TV. DJ’d by them, and run by Eric Spiegelman, he of Old Jews Telling Jokes.
Maybe it’s just best to let them explain. Read More
What makes a Molly?
Three well-known Internet writers–Molly Young, Molly Lambert, and Molly McAleer–share more than a name. The three have long attracted attention for their similar methods of self-promotion on the blogging platforms Tumblr and Twitter. Read More
What makes a Molly?
Three well-known Internet writers–Molly Young, Molly Lambert, and Molly McAleer–share more than a name. The three have long attracted attention for their similar methods of self-promotion on the blogging platforms Tumblr and Twitter. Read More
You don’t have to be named Molly to be a Molly, though it helps. Mollies Lambert, Young and McAleer got attention not merely for their Ringwaldian monikers but for their coyly insightful writing about pop culture, their minute observations, and the manner in which they promoted themselves via social media. They’re not the only Read More
The Hairpin, the second spin-off site launched by The Awl in two months, went live last night.
Along with the other Awl sister site Splitsider and new sponsorship deals with companies such as Ann Taylor, The Hairpin is helping make The Awl a profitable enterprise for the first time since its April 2009 launch. In Read More
“I thought this was supposed to be a book party,” The Observer overheard a guest say at last week’s launch for Mischief & Mayhem, a publishing imprint founded by Lisa Dierbeck, Joshua Furst, D. W. Gibson, Dale Peck and Choire Sicha in collaboration with OR Books. The guest was staring, mouth agape, at two burlesque Read More
“I think that we recognize that we’re way past the moment of panic,” said the novelist DW Gibson yesterday. “And it now sort of feels like a land of opportunity.”
Mr. Gibson was explaining why he and four of his friends– Choire Sicha of the Awl and fellow novelists Dale Peck, Lisa Dierbeck, and Joshua Read More
At 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time today Longshot magazine announced that the them for the next issue will be—drumroll—”comeback.” The new incarnation of last May’s 48 HR magazine, which was forced to change its name after a cease and desist from CBS, will be taking submissions in reporting, personal essay, fiction, and other categories—but only until 3:00 Read More
