Gawker Will Turn Into a Politics Site as the Company Plans a Big Overhaul
After a tumultuous year, Gawker Media—known for its gossip, commentary, and sharp takes on the news of the day—is refocusing and reorganizing for 2016. In two internal memos released today, Gawker founder Nick Denton and executive editor John Cook revealed plans to sharpen the focus of the site’s seven main verticals, including Gawker.com and Gizmodo, while killing sub-sites and laying off several employees.
“In today’s crowded and confusing digital media world, you should focus on your strengths and have a clear message for your audience,” Denton said in an internal memo. “That’s especially true for a self-funded digital media company like Gawker Media Group.”
The most dramatic shift for the company will come to its flagship site Gawker.com, which will be moving away from covering news and gossip more generally to focusing on politics, specifically the 2016 presidential election and related campaigns. “The shift in focus will necessarily mean that certain kinds of stories that Gawker has trafficked in in the past will go by the wayside,” Cook said in another memo.
One Thousand Flowers
As part of the reorganization, the company is laying off seven staffers. “We can’t reshape the site’s focus without shifting personnel,” Cook said. The restructuring comes just two days after former Gawker writer Dayna Evans published a scathing look at the company’s treatment of women. One of the laid-off staffers, Jason Parham, was known at the site for being one of the site’s more visible advocates for inclusion. The company said that it will be creating six new jobs where they’re needed.
While Gawker.com shifts to cover politics, changes are coming to other popular verticals Jezebel and Gizmodo, as well. Sister site Jezebel, known for its coverage of women’s issues, will “become the primary voice for celebrity and pop culture.” The site will also be launching a health, beauty, and self-care section. Tech site Gizmodo, meanwhile, will now include coverage from science site io9.
The company will also be shuttering a number of niche sites, like Gawker’s weather blog The Vane; Jezebel’s Kitchenette; Jalopnik’s Fight Club; Defamer; and Valleywag. “We have taken a hard look across the whole network at our strategy with subsites. In many ways, we let 1,000 flowers bloom, a strategy that resulted in some successes, likeAdequate Man, but also bred confusion among the readers and a thicket of different editorial rabbit holes,” Cook said.
‘Looseness with Budgets’
The question in all of this, of course, is, well, why? For Gawker, the latest restructuring follows a tough year for the company. Over the summer, it lost both its executive editor and Gawker.com’s editor-in-chief following Denton’s decision to pull a controversial story. The company also remains engaged in a lengthy and costly legal battle against Hulk Hogan. The trial is set to begin next year.
In one memo today, Cook also suggested that the company may feel some stress in its proverbial wallet. “I think it’s fair to say that we’ve all felt some measure of looseness with budgets over the past year as we rapidly expanded and moved into our new space. The fact of that matter is that we need to tighten up, and make sure that we’re strategic and focused in how we deploy our resources,” he added.
The company also seems to be cutting back on development costs with its proprietary blogging platform, Kinja. “On the technology front, we will no longer seek to develop Kinja as an open blogging platform, given the competition that exists from technology companies devoted entirely to that challenge,” Denton said. For Gawker, an independent media company without outside financing to fall back on, restructuring, refocusing, and cutting back may make the most sense when the future remains unclear.
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