Click here to listen to the voice mail.

Back in 2006 Michelle Malkin posted the phone numbers of some college kids planning to protest Ann Coulter. The kids—who were neither running for office nor inserted at the last minute to the great buffet table of family values on display at the nationally televised Republican National Convention—received death threats! Malkin refused to take those phone numbers down! When they complained, Malkin reposted their numbers!

Ha! Also, of course, Malkin thinks we should've kept all the Japanese-Americans in WWII locked up in internment camps forever and ever, but hey. Outrage-off! Cesspool Blog! Bastards all!!!

[Photo-illustration (c) back when people gave a shit about Michelle Malkin.]

"hello, i was not quite sure where to send this email.. so i just decided to send it to this onw..but the email is directed at "balk" whoever this is..

i think its just simply disgusting to write this sentence:

"No wonder the Turks tried to genocide these people out of existence. If we....."

im armenian, and i dont really care about kim kardashian and her butt..
but writing this sentence is just stupid and ruthless.. and actually not funny at all..and im sure many people share the same opinion
it seems like you dont know really what happened, otherwise you wouldnt write this..

you dont have to know about it actually...but as soon as you are using it in your article, you should know what you are writing about

this probably is not going to be taken seriously, but it made me feel better

I'm glad. That is a rude thing to write.

If you can write three concise, timely and relevant posts each week in your topic of choice, then we want to hear from you. Just picture it now: your name in lights all over your city. Your mom will be so proud.

Oh, and we'll pay you for it. A little at first, but as your page views grow over time, so will your ability to make more.

Sound good? Then click the Apply Now button below. We'll ask you some questions and get some information we need to process your application, including the city in which you'd like to contribute and the category you think is most relevant. Not sure? Pick one and we can work with you later on getting it right. For example, if you want to be the Yoga Examiner in Des Moines, you will choose your edition: Des Moines and your category: Fitness. Your topic may have appeal in more than one category, but choose the one you think it fits into best.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future of media: today the Yoga Examiner in Des Moines is spamming you with Digg requests, tomorrow... oh, wait, this is the present of media, right here in New York.

(Also, they are not bloggers. "They are not bloggers, but Examiners, which means they look closely at topics and examine every aspect of them." Ok then.)

The promotional campaign kicks in next week so get excited! Get particularly excited if you're a traditionally paid staffer at an Anschutz paper (all six of you guys!), 'cause this seems like a dangerous experiment.

Anywho, I found last weekend that it's a waste of time to spend all day hoping that more than six or seven interesting items will come out on a summer Saturday or Sunday. Parsing the Sunday Times and the nonsense in the garbage Brit weekend newspapers in July and August? Good ol' Methuselah's life was too short for that. And mine is likely to be quite a spell shorter. So...

Rather than get depressed as all hell by locking myself up in my apartment every weekend for the rest of the summer and looking at 45 Digg posts in a row of two-year-old videos and pictures of Miley getting coffee, I'm cutting the weekends in half.

For the rest of the summer, I'm gonna post a few items early in the morning. Then there will be a nice, long, long siesta, and then I will post a few more items late in the afternoon or early in the evening.

I hope that's cool with everyone. It is frankly all the attention anyone should pay the weekend media during this season of frolic and fun. It's not as if any of them were about to say anything that meant anything, ever, to anyone, anywhere.

See you tomorrow!

I've become accustomed to Gawker's racism [really? -ed] — from articles tagging black rappers with "HNIC" [that's the name of Prodigy's album! From an item about Prodigy! -ed] to videos of kids playing and adults having conversations with each other in Chicago accompanied by the headlines "Gun Warfare!" and "Drug Dealing." [Well, those were maybe a bit more questionable. We're charitable today! -ed] Sadly, I continue to return for the occasionally funny, entertaining and/or informative posts (which are becoming fewer and farther between).

We're so sorry for your inability to stop reading our site.

However, your coverage of the New Yorker Obama cover has been nothing short of appalling. The bloggers who put up the posts killed themselves trying to argue that no matter how offensive the images, artistic and editorial freedom justified any offense to the public or to the Obamas themselves. They even went so far as to add a third post lamenting the imprisonment of a Dutch cartoonist for posting sickening and degrading images of Muslims that lacked any political value and served no purpose other than to nauseate the viewer. When your bloggers are bending over backwards to defend someone whose images clearly demonstrate that he barely sees Muslim people as human, it is clear that Gawker has missed the entire point of the outrage over the Obama cover. This isn't about the New Yorker's right to print anything or the cartoonist's right to draw anything. It's about whether the New Yorker cover adds anything meaningful to the ongoing conversation about the Presidential candidates. It doesn't.

Let's call the images what they are: cookie cutter racist stereotypes pasted together onto a page. In the endless round of commentary, the Gawker bloggers and commenters debated back and forth on whether the images should be withheld simply out of fear that they would be misinterpreted by "dumb" red-state Americans who don't subscribe to the New Yorker. Aside from a single commenter (American Dreamer) not a singe individual recognized that the images themselves — a caricature of black and muslim people as armed, be-afroed and anti-American — are offensive and insulting. Whether intentionally or not, the cartoon mocks blacks and muslims just as much as it does right-wingers. Why not face the fact that the cover is not cutting edge or avant-garde, but actually reproduces the same old, tired stereotypes that have been around for decades? Taking a racist image and putting it on liberal magazine does not suddenly make it not racist. It's sad that Gawker isn't willing to acknowledge that fact in any way. It's even more sad that only one person in the Gawker "community" is aware enough to see this.

The absurdity of this is demonstrated by how different the blog posts and comments are on Gawker, as compared with Racialicious, Daily Kos, Jezebel and the Huffington Post, among others. Take a look and quit your snarky self-congratulatory statements about editorial freedom. When you've sunk so low that you have to justify your position by defending an image of Jesus sodomizing Mohammed, it's just embarassing. That is all.

This is the kind of condescending bullshit that does actually encourage us to agree with the idiots who think the covers are a problem because everyone else in America won't get them. The rightness of our position—that if people refuse to understand obvious satire because they don't trust anyone else to understand obvious satire then we might as well all pack it up and go home because there's no intelligent way to contribute to the National Conversation anymore, at all—is demonstrated by how different the blog posts and comments are on Gawker, as compared with Racialicious, Daily Kos, Jezebel and the Huffington Post, among others. No offense to those sites (well, no offense to Racialicious and Jezebel), but yes, we have a different position, which is that there is somewhere out there still a nation of adults. Adults who understand how irony, absurdity, and, yes, context work.

The entire point is that while we don't find anything edifying or amusing about an image of Jesus sodomizing Mohammed (except inasmuch as an image of Jesus sodomizing anyone is inherently hilarious), we shouldn't be throwing crackpots who draw such an image in jail. And furthermore anyone who'd equate said cartoon (provocation with no point other than provocation) with the New Yorker's cover (provocation in the name of getting you to think about your response to the image) in a blanket condemnation of both is dense and dangerous.

If the image is offensive, it's because the smears and whispers the image illustrates are offensive, and that is the point of illustrating all of them at one—both to call attention to these "dark imaginings," in Remnick's nice little phrase, and, by exaggerating them, to defang them, slightly. And the commentariat's outright refusal to get it is disingenuous and utterly unsurprising.

But in the interests of mending fences or building bridges or whatever, we've commissioned this totally inoffensive and not at all racist photoshop of Barack Obama, in a library, wearing a Harvard shirt, that we will use from now on. We wanted him maybe playing polo, waving a French flag (Happy Bastille Day!), and drinking a latte with his pinkie extended, but this will have to do, for now.

Photoshop Credit: Steven Dressler

Last night, Manhattan Borough President and proud parrot-owner Scott Stringer made a surprise visit to the Gawker Media inner sanctum. The perma-Upper West Sider, who is said to be eyeing a run at citywide office, confessed affection for Gawker and old sister site Wonkette. Interested in the machinations of new media, Stringer regaled us with tales of how it used to be: when he worked for future Congressman Jerry Nadler in the '80s, Nadler's press releases went to old media types not by phone or fax or smoke signal, but by Stringer himself, who used to ride the subways around town all day to hand-deliver the pages to the city's newsdesks.

Huh. So... he thinks he will be the next mayor? And, even more ludicrous, he thinks the support of Gawker will somehow help? (We have our suspicious as to which Dem campaign consultants recommended this little visit.)

Know the Sharing/Oversharing Divide. A bit of personal info—we have a kitty!—makes you a friend. Too much personal info—check out my facial!—makes you a target. This is not even a fine line. It is a very obvious line. It is the line that drove Julia Allison off the net before. Since her return, she, surprisingly, has not really crossed it!

Don't Write Like An Asshole. Kinda hard to quantify this one, right? Especially because some of us make our livings acting like pricks all day. But writing assholish things and writing like an asshole are different! Keith Gessen often Tumblrs like an asshole. Yes, you have a fine little magazine, but the I'll buy you a beer if you are half as impressive as me when you're my age thing is one of the douchiest things we've ever read, especially because dude is not actually Norman Mailer yet. Ditto for Lodwick's contention that his pretty websites "change the world." No, they don't! Maybe "asshole" just means "solipsist?" It does seem to, doesn't it. Which brings us to:

Manage Your Narcissism. Please. And:

Have a Sense of Humor Please.

STOP DIGGING. You're mocked or attacked. Respond with a cutting counter-attack, a reasonable and self-reflective defense, or DON'T RESPOND AT ALL. Or email the author and make friendly! This secret tactic usually works wonders. DON'T flail about helplessly in the comments section, where you'll be piled on. Don't post something hurt and whiny that reinforces whatever real or imagined fault you were attacked for. Bite back and enjoy the game or ignore it and move on with your life. Mr. Keith Gessen sort of did this, which is why we'll link to his cute puppy pictures.

Man Up. This advice is very sexist but also sadly useful.

Own Your Terrible Gimmick This is basically summed up as "fuck the haters." It means that when we (or anyone else!) do things like this to you, you do this.

Read This. Will Leitch is leaving the internet, but he imparted wisdom on his way to print.

Be Like Doree Everyone likes Doree. Everyone! Look at how she deflects criticism!

Don't Storm Off the Internet In a Huff. It's embarrassing. Also it makes the entire internet indistinguishable from LiveJournal, which is depressing.

We hope this helps all you Tumblrs and Tweeters out there! You whiny idiots!

...maybe that's true. Nick's made dumb hires before. And maybe it's why Nick needled him the other week. (Nick says he just needed an excuse to post the embarrassing story).

But—if Gutfeld's tale is true, it's certainly not something I knew about. I just make fun of Greg because I think he's annoying.

(Full disclosure: I met Greg once, long ago, at a party at Nick's place. And he was kinda funny, in person, in a rude, fratty way. I think New Yorkers just find that schtick so amusing because it's a novelty in the media scene? There can't be many meathead state school grads at the Observer.)

Gutfeld: Nick Denton 'Doesn't Like People Saying No to Him Apparently' [FishbowlNY]

Fuerzabruta,Daily News calls "a sexy, heart-pounding fantasy," would like you to win a pair of vouchers to their show! So email us with the subject line "Fuerzabruta Contest" and we'll select a random lucky winner.

I'm amazed we've managed to keep a lid on this news; that, given your naturally gossipy natures, must be a first! We're spinning off three sites: Idolator, Gridskipper and—this one may be a surprise—Wonkette. There were indeed some rumors about Maura Johnston's music blog late last year; they were true of course. For reasons that I'll explain below, both it and our travel and politics sites have better commercial futures outside Gawker than within. (Excuse the corporate lingo: some of it is unavoidable.) But, first, the facts, which will be hitting the wires later this morning, or as soon as you leak this email. Go ahead!

* IDOLATOR is going to Buzznet, a music-focused web and social network. Buzznet recently acquired Idolator's chief rival, Stereogum, and received a big investment from Universal Music Group.
* GRIDSKIPPER isn't going far: it's being taken over by Curbed, the network founded by Lockhart Steele, in which Gawker Media is a shareholder.
* 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.

Why these three sites? To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did.

Music audiences are fragmented across genres; Maura's Idolator gave Stereogum a good run, but a group with a whole array of music sites will command more attention from record labels than we could. In the case of Gridskipper, our urban travel guide, we could never match Curbed in attention to city-specific content and advertising. As for Wonkette: political advertisers are a strange breed; they don't come through the same agencies our sales people deal with.

I'm relieved we've found pretty decent homes for the three sites, and most of their writers, but we're gutted to lose them. Idolator's Pop Critic's Poll was a tremendous coup—and Patric's bleeding-heart logo for the site was one of my favorites. Gridskipper is so far the most sophisticated travel blog: it entirely deserved its inclusion in Time's list of the 50 coolest websites.

And Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it. The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced the word ass-fucking into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor's slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, DC. And Ken and his team have brought a new liveliness to the site this election season—validated by the record traffic of the last three months.

So why not wait, at least till the election? Well, since the end of last year, we've been expecting a downturn. Scratch that: since the middle of 2006, when we sold off Screenhead, shuttered Sploid and declared we were "hunkering down", we've been waiting for the internet bubble to burst. No, really, this time. And, even if not, better safe than sorry; and better too early than too late.

Everybody says that the internet is special; that advertising is still moving away from print and TV; and Gawker sites are still growing in traffic by about 90% a year, way faster than the web as a whole. But it would be naive to think that we can merely power through an advertising recession. 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.The dozen sites that remain represent some 97% or our 228m pageviews per month, and an even higher proportion of our growth and advertising revenue. (Key facts are below, in case anyone asks.) We'll be able to devote more attention to breakouts such as Jezebel and io9, as well as established titles such as Gizmodo and Kotaku, which are becoming utterly dominant in their domains. And, then, once this recession is done with, and we come up from the bunker to survey the internet wasteland around us, we can decide on what new territories we want to colonize.

Both Noah and I are around to answer any questions. On email, IM, or phone.

Regards

Nick

Gawker Media
Our publisher Nick Denton loves to point out that no major media company could buy Gawker and keep up the site's outsider angle. Of course he wants you to believe Gawker does something special and to think of it as a competitor to decades-old media empires. But he's not lying.

When this network tried licensing stories to Yahoo News two years ago, the editors bitched about it (this was before he replaced them with inexperienced, unsure toadies like me), and the stories never did well. Gawker and Yahoo let the contract expire, and while Denton pretended it was because I kept maligning Yahoo execs on our Silicon Valley site Valleywag, it was really because no one was reading Gawker on Yahoo. Their audience just wasn't interested.

Imagine you were running this show. Why sell it and either work under some executive who probably hates you for some five-year-old blog post, or struggle to start another business that becomes this influential? It's easy to say Denton is in this for the money, but only if you've never seen the man revel in his own role. He doesn't want to be rich, he wants to be Rupert Murdoch.

TechCrunch
Before he started Silicon Valley's most influential blog, Michael Arrington (pictured demonstrating caution and humility in Business 2.0) was a successful lawyer, but this didn't make him much of an analyst. Despite frequently getting his story utterly wrong, he built influence by covering every startup that would talk to him. Tech writer Paul Boutin figured it out: TechCrunch wasn't a news source, it was a phone directory, and that's what the Valley wanted. Arrington used his local influence to earn a few scoops, and now he's an unignorable player in tech reporting.

But it's all him. Most press about TechCrunch is actually about Arrington. None of his writers are breakaway talents. And while the blog probably makes over a million a year in ad revenue, TechCrunch also makes plenty from its conferences (and "parties" where startups pay to demo products for liquored up biz-dev guys). As with Gawker, the publisher makes the brand. If Arrington sold but stayed in charge, he might have to stop writing dramatic posts like "When will we have our first Valleywag suicide?" If he left the blog, what's left? A staff of amateurish writers who can't get the scoops Arrington gets?

Boing Boing
Boing Boing is owned by its four idiosyncratic writers, who act like the blog is still the small-time zine it started out as in the 90s. For example, Cory Doctorow always pushes his anti-copyright agenda, and Mark Frauenfelder owns the ukulele news beat. That's why the blog remains popular even when sites like Digg theoretically replaced the its role as a clearinghouse for Internet memes. The blog was getting nearly a million views per day before the team stopped publicly reporting traffic, but at its heart it's a personal blog, and selling it would be like selling a favorite pet: theoretically possible but against the whole point. Besides, they all have other work that they can promote to their Boing Boing fans, and that's more valuable than ad revenue.

Weblogs, Inc.
The network of over thirty blogs made sense for AOL because it was already a non-personality-based news farm that paid under $10 per post (even lower than Gawker Media at that point), churning out consumer-friendly content. Since then, most of its blogs fell behind competitors, except for the still wildly successful Engadget tech blog. Founder Jason Calacanis was indeed in it for the money, and he left the network soon after the sale to try relaunching Netscape as a social news site (the project failed and is now just a section on the Netscape web site). Calacanis's new project, a web directory, is even less personality-based. Maybe a blog network could replicate Weblogs's success, but it would have to focus on a niche, as no one will manage to dominate as many topics as Weblogs did.

Everyone Else
Well all the others are too small, aren't they? If you want to hire a writer, you could buy his blog and immediately dissolve it, but there's no point adding an existing blog to an existing media outlet.

Most magazines, TV networks and newspapers have already launched blogs with current and new staff. It's cheaper and avoids creative conflicts. Plus blogs always have a lower revenue-per-pageview rate than the media sites that could buy them, so any acquired blog would have to be integrated into the buyer's ad inventory.

For the record, Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, but Denton's hired at least three people who started blogs about Gawker.

We really have no reason to, first of all. We got a tip from an actual marketing executive, and we put it up. I would make an educated guess that it's true, but people can judge for themselves, as they have access to all the information about where it came from and what it said. That's Gawker for you. Always servicey. (Even though we know you and your people have had plenty of issues with sites like Valleywag and Consumerist, as well).

Furthermore, you and your agency aren't really the paragons of honesty and decency in communications that you present yourselves to be. You guys have run a political-style, multimillion-dollar campaign for years on behalf of Wal-Mart, one of the most objectionable companies in the world. In my opinion! Edelman also had the whole fake, undisclosed pro- Wal-Mart blog scandal, when it turned out that you arranged and paid for a guy to go around writing positive things about the company in a folksy, supposedly independent blog. Yea, you apologized for that one. But then there was that big article in the New Yorker about your work with Wal-Mart, where you lied and said that the 100% company-controlled Astroturf group "Working Families for Wal-Mart" was "A real group of people, as far as I know." I made the case that that was a blatant lie when I was at PRWeek, and I still believe it.

I know that you disagree with that, because I had to have two separate sit-down meetings with you and your subordinate over that little blog post. Thank you again for breakfast at the Harvard Club. You do seem like a nice guy. The problem is that you take anything negative said about your agency, which consists of thousands of employees, as a personal insult to you. And honestly, we hear a fair amount of shitty things about your agency. How in the world could you possibly know that the story about telling executives to lie during media training is false? It's perfectly plausible that some dumb, shady people work for you. It's very likely, in fact. But it sounds bad for Edelman, and you take it personally.

Like I said, you're a nice guy. So are many other people at Edelman (nice women as well, whatever the case may be). But much of your work— Wal-Mart being the best example— is just objectionable on philosophical grounds, like a lot of things in the PR industry. If every multinational PR firm crumbled to pieces tomorrow, the world would be a slightly better place. Just my opinion! If you wanna help the ethical state of the industry, that's great. But when PR people who happen to work for your agency do bad things and the word gets out, people are gonna write about it. Lighten up!

If you resign that Wal-Mart account, though, we will buy you breakfast. You pick the place.

Like the rest of America, we missed the mention. But a loyal viewer said it went something like this:

"So far I've seen it on MediaBistro, Romenes... it got over 6,000 hits on Gawker."
[Screengrabs of Romenesko and Gawker on screen]

Over 6,000 hits! There is not a single item in history that was picked up from Romenesko and then went on to get 6,000+ views.

Screengrab? Or clip? Anyone?

Update: We have the Cashmere Mafia clip! It's amazing how "with it" this show is! Also it's totally up-to-date because Choire would never have let us use "Bitch" in a headline.

Hello Love, We have anxieties about you. After all, what is life after Gawker? The Streets? Nah. You could join the army. Do PR: an outrageous fantasy. Do not write a bad novel about life at Gawker with angst or even with waspish humor. There are merits to being a YOGA instructor; it is not well paid in dollars; but better in emotional reward. The role is even socially useful. Do we send food packages? Wine is too bulky. Here is a gift certificate for three bottles of my 07 white. More when you return clean empty bottles. Stay well, Walter D.

Today, however, we feel that we should recognize the role the program's producers have played in creating the Shepherd Sensation: Sure, Sherri might be the one dropping the 23-carat-gold-schmeared bagels and yelping about how a $1,000 glass of Scotch makes her "hot like a ho" (those looking for a cheaper freak-releasing option can always just supply some eggnog) but it's The View's behind-the-scenes masterminds who put her into these situations where her comedic talents can truly shine.

• The View [ABC.com]
• Previously: Spiked Eggnog, Santa Hats Allow Sherri Shepherd To Unleash Her Inner Christmas Freak [Defamer]

• "Domiciliate With 'The Touched': 'Craig's Listings' Announcement Presents A Hallet's Cove Bedroom To Be Shared With Immoral Painted Ladies"
• "The Rising Cost of Morphine: Who Can Afford To Be A Chinaman These Days?"
• "Ask Mlle. Tionna: My Husband Returned From the Meuse-Argonne Offensive With a Social Disease!"
• "New York Herald-Tribune Head-Line Offends Delicate Sensibilities, Amuses The Vulgar"
• "The Robber Barons: Jay Gould's Standard Of Living Is Quite Offensive To Us"
• "'Vanity Fair' Editor Robert Benchley: Has He Lost It?"
• "Gawker Calendar Of Events And Amusements: Ride A Penny-Farthing To The World's Fair!"

The Times They Aren't A Changing

At its most basic, the reporting may at times be little more than value-added blogging: a story in the news, put in context with a quick Nexis search, and deconstructed. At its most elevated, the new Gawker hire may experiment with a new form of reporting, unique to online, in which ideas are floated, appeals made to the readers, and the story assembled over the course of several items, from speculation, and tips from users. Here's the kind of person suited to the position.

• At least two years of experience as a reporter at a daily or weekly newspaper, covering either crime news, business, or media and culture (yes, a print background is an advantage).
  
• Ability to write five short items a day, some one-offs, some to further an ongoing campaign or investigation.
  
• A reporter who appreciates the discipline of newspaper traditions, but chafes under them.
  
• A natural gossip who loves the story and, even more, the story behind the story.
  
• familiarity with blogging software, RSS readers and graphics editing tools a big plus.

You may have heard that blogs don't pay; that's no longer the case. Short letter explaining why you're suited, with links to articles online, by December 19, to Noah Robischon with the subject line: Reporter.