Gawker Loses Half Editorial Staff
From NY Times:
“In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.”
More interesting to me is why:
“Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another. ‘It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,’ Ms. Gould said. ‘You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.’”
Here, for example, is the image that usually accompanies coverage of rumors related to FM — FM’s founder and CEO, John Battelle, giving the Battelle Salute, taken sometime in the late 1990s:
