Name: Gawker Wants to Start Playing Nice
Uploaded: 2016-04-14
Duration: 4 min 9 s
Description: CEO Nick Denton explains why the company is turning away from sensationalism.

You announced last November that the site Gawker is gonna shift its focus entirely to political news coverage. That seems like a big change also, so why make that shift? It's actually not big a change for Gawker, given they broke the story of Rob Ford, the mayor of Toronto being a Crack smoker and consorting with drug dealers. We put out stories about [ COUGH ] the Craigslist congressman. The Republican congressman from upstate New York who was sending around shirtless photographs of himself to women and I think transsexuals that he had met on Craigslist. So there's scandalous stories. The fact is that Politics at least right now, in this election cycle is a show. Donald Trump is a showman, he's a reality TV star, he seems to have a little rift on his real persona or as Hulk Hogan does, I think we live in an era in which entertainment And reality shows and politics have all sort of merged. It's a great topic for talk. It's coming together. How's it going so far? This is a new shift, so has it. Has it had any impact on traffic? Did traffic drop because it was new? Traffic has actually gone up since November. That's [ INAUDIBLE ]. We have Donald Trump to thank for that. But we, like a lot of other people in the new space, have benefited from, it's a fascinating election campaign, says a lot about society. So this wasn't a reaction to get away from the controversial things like the whole [ UNKNOWN ] story or the story about the media executives that [ UNKNOWN ] got a lot of fire for. Last summer. This came shortly after that, but it wasn't in response to that? I think we have to recognize that Gawker, all of our seven properties really, including Deadspin and Jezebel and Gizmodo, they are the larger and more powerful than I think we recognized. And it's important for us, if we're gonna punch, to punch hard. cocker shifting away from the sort of racy root scenes, to me like the ultimate sign that we may be moving past this era of sensationalism. Has there been a change in what the reader wants or expects to see in the internet? It's a great question. I actually don't think so. I think people still like sensational stories, interesting stories as much as they ever did. And what has Changes. There's more criticism. So there's more criticism of the criticism. So we're all surrounded when this is broadcast. I'm sure they'll be people tweeting and criticizing probably more me than you but other than that [ INAUDIBLE ] that we have to live it. So I think people are more conscious of the costs as well as the benefits. But you did say you wanted to make Gawker to 10 % to 15 % nicer at one point right. What do you mean by that? I mean just that. Literally that. Literally that. And I think media Companies, media brands. They need to course correct and they need to respond their readership. I think that's how the system works. My problem with this Hulk Hogan trial, I think we should absolutely be held to account. But I think it's actually much more productive for the media, for words and pictures, to be For speech to regulate speech. For us to hold each other accountable. For our readers to hold us accountable. Rather than a sometimes cumbersome court system. Do you think that some of this has to do with the fact that now there's this sentiment that this could happen to anybody. We're all on social media now. Everyday citizens could have a video about them. Expose something that they don't wanna expose. And so, the coin might have flipped a little bit, in terms of where their loyalties lie, and that might be reflected in this jury. That's totally an interesting point. I think we're all at least a little bit celebrities, or at least we're public in the sense that If we put photographs out or make claims on Facebook then people might wanna hold us to account. But we're also critics and we speak much more in public and we criticize much more in public, and so I think we are also in need of the protections for that kind of expression and speech. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

CEO Nick Denton explains why the company is turning away from sensationalism.