Today’s Mediabistro newsletter featured two links that, even though they were presented as unrelated, made me chuckle while reading them after one another.
On the one hand, there’s Nick Denton’s internal memo about Gawker Media’s current market position. From the memo:
The bad news… We got overtaken by Buzzfeed in November. They surged to 133m global uniques. Damn. That’s impressive. And Upworthy — even smarmier than Buzzfeed — is nipping at our heels.[…]
The Gawker Media network ranks at 21 in the US as measured by Quantcast, the highest rank we’ve seen. And this is cool: among mobile users, Gawker, Gizmodo, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel and Jalopnik were all among Quantcast’s top 100 sites.
And then this:
Kinja — which enlists readers as contributors to listicles as well as other collaborative editorial projects — will take us the next level up.
The other link in Mediabistro’s newsletter was related to a hoax that spread like wildfire across the internet. “Rothman: HuffPost’s Gut-Wrenching Poverty Editorial That Went Viral a Hoax”. The title of this piece is actually misleading. HuffPost only republished the “poverty editorial” in question which, originally appeared and was subsequently reshared on Kinja. From Kinja, it made its way to Jezebel’s Groupthink and from there to Gawker’s frontpage. The piece was eventually picked and republished by HuffPost and what started as a single post on a Kinja blog got the writer more than 60,000 dollars in donations.
I do have to wonder what this “next level” and “collaborative editorial projects” that Nick Denton have in mind for Kinja actually entail.
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