The Social

The final Media Meshing party on Thursday night.

(Credit: Kate Miltner (flickr.com/photos/loggedhours))

NEW YORK--I hereby insist that we all stop using the "Recession? What recession?" line, which seems to be used every time any company has thrown any moderately lavish party in the last two months. Not only is it overused, but I think folks have caught onto the fact that things have legitimately changed.

Here in New York, the last blowout launch party in the city was for T-Mobile's Android phone in October. Company holiday parties have been scaled back like mad, leaving fewer opportunities for that great New York sport known as party-crashing. But socialization hasn't stopped; it's just changed its tune.

There were a few events of note this week. Note the trend: no more open bars!

The Goods for Good charity event at the downtown City Winery.

(Credit: Goods for Good)

• On Monday night, a relatively new nonprofit called Goods for Good held its annual benefit (read: everyone paid to get in) at a new downtown venue called the City Winery. (It is, in fact, Manhattan's only winery.) Goods for Good's mission is to gather unwanted corporate supplies en masse, from pens and notebooks to conference swag, and donate it to schools in developing countries.

It wasn't a tech event, per se, but there's a reason I'm including it here: The organizers said that they're not really on Silicon Valley's radar, but would like to be. At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco earlier this year, we saw the emergence of SchwagginWagon, which encouraged conference attendees to donate the free stuff they got on the show floor and then didn't want. Goods for Good's angle is a little different, since they are interested in bulk supplies that would otherwise be thrown away and that could actually be put to use in a classroom. Check 'em out if you're interested.

• Blip.tv, a video-sharing platform that pulled in another round of financing just in time, threw its holiday party at a low-key downtown bar on Wednesday night. There was no open bar; company executives were surreptitiously handing out drink tokens instead. Within a couple of hours, the place was pretty much a mosh pit--even when the free drinks ran out.

• Prankster-slash-boulevardier Richard Blakeley, by day the video editor at Gawker Media, decided earlier this month to call off his series of monthly "Media Meshing" mixers. There's never been anything lavish about Media Meshing; it's a cash-bar event at a relatively divey bar called Sweet and Vicious. But Blakeley's rationale was that it's a bit gauche to be throwing a series of media parties while people continue to lose their jobs. Gawker itself has gone through rolling layoffs this season, sparing Blakeley but axing many of his cohorts.

So Thursday night was the final Media Meshing, at least for a while. There are persistent rumors that someone else with less recession sensitivity will take the reins. Or not. But in either case, the economic reality has clearly hit the after-hours scene.

"I haven't had a drink all night," one of Blakeley's Gawker colleagues told me, shaking his head. Knowing that such behavior was uncharacteristic, I asked him why. His reply was, "Because nobody's offered to buy me one yet."

New York-based blog network Gawker Media continues to trim its staff after a big layoff round in October, MediaBistro reported Tuesday. A few more members of the editorial staff have been let go, and a few others have been downgraded to part-time employees.

"It's all part of the austerity plan we announced a month ago," Gawker Media founder Nick Denton said in an instant-message conversation. He added, "I don't make any apologies: we're going to need as big a cash pile as we can accumulate."

Denton has been particularly bearish on the fate of ad-supported media companies in the face of industrywide cutbacks, suggesting that online ad revenue may drop a full 40 percent and responding with fierce cost-cutting. Company revenue is strong--up 39 percent in November, Denton said--and traffic continues to grow. The company has a history of dealing with underperforming titles by simply selling them or shutting them down rather than letting them bleed cash. It's a strategy that has been called both ruthless and prudent.

In the scandal department (it's Gawker, after all): One of the employees MediaBistro reported was cut, Alex Carnevale, allegedly cribbed part of a blog post from his personal blog last week, if smaller media gossip blog Jossip is to be believed. Denton, however, said that wasn't part of the rationale behind his departure: Carnevale had been a temporary employee, serving one month on sci-fi blog IO9 and one on Gawker.

"He did some good stuff, and I'd like to try him out again," the company founder said.

Of more interest to the tech blogging world, Gawker recently slimmed down its Silicon Valley scandal title, Valleywag, opting to fold the brand into a column on Gawker.com instead.

A correction was made at 9:54 a.m. PT: ThisRecording is considered to be a personal blog that Alex Carnevale writes for with several other contributors, not an employer.

On the same day that he published a detailed missive about his dire predictions for the online ad market, Gawker Media overlord Nick Denton made public his decision to shut down Valleywag, the blog network's Silicon Valley gossip title. Valleywag was launched early in 2006.

Valleywag editor Owen Thomas will have his job folded into a column on the Gawker.com flagship title, a gossip blog focused primarily on the New York media industry. Denton explained in an e-mail to CNET News that Thomas will remain full-time and that the Valleywag brand (as well as Valleywag.com) will stay alive.

Presumably, this means that Thomas' posts will be syndicated to Valleywag.com even though their chief destination will now be Gawker.com.

A recession seems like a great time to be running a gossip blog about the tech business, given all the juicy photos of sad, laid-off employees and rumors of badly-behaved CEOs mismanaging their companies that inevitably fly around. But the reason for Valleywag's shutdown was Denton's notoriously doom-and-gloom vision of the future--Internet ad spending will decline a full 40 percent, he predicts--and Valleywag was one of the company's less lucrative titles.

"Valleywag's traffic isn't enough to pay for two writers, even with Ketel One ads on every page," wrote Valleywag senior writer Paul Boutin, who will not stay full-time at Gawker Media.

It was a tough sell for advertisers, given its niche audience, and many tech companies would be hesitant to advertise on a publication dedicated to ridiculing tech companies. And then there was the fact that you just can't turn the average Valley exec or VC into a Perez Hilton-style celebrity. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk simply don't add up to Britney Spears-like followings.

Reactions in the tech community will probably be mixed. Valleywag is mean, to be sure, but it can also be hilarious, and writers Thomas and Boutin were tech-press regulars long before their Gawker gigs.

Denton's handling of Gawker has been frugal, continually consolidating resources toward the blogs that were pulling in traffic and ad dollars and not hesitating to shut down the underperformers. In April, Gawker Media sold off three of its smallest blogs, and Denton has now announced that another, Consumerist, is on the block.

Early in October, Denton orchestrated a personnel shuffling that saw 14 percent of the company's editorial staff laid off but new hires made at some of the most successful titles like gadget blog Gizmodo and feminist chronicle Jezebel.

Also on Wednesday, AllThingsD's Peter Kafka reporter that Gawker Media managing editor Noah Robischon was leaving for Fast Company.

This post was expanded at 11:51 a.m. PT on Thursday.

The financial crisis strikes again: Successful New York-based blog network Gawker Media will be laying off 19 of its 133 editorial staffers, according to an internal e-mail from publisher Nick Denton. The company will be additionally suspending its bonus payments to writers and editors, but will be increasing their base pay and making some strategic hires at the company's most successful blogs.

"With the savings, we are increasing base pay and hiring 10 new people on the most commercially successful Gawker sites," Denton wrote in the e-mail. "But I know that's scant consolation for the colleagues we're losing and for those of you who have been enjoying the bonus windfalls from breakout stories."

The bonus system at Gawker, a network of snarky and witty gossip- and culture-focused blogs that Denton founded in 2002, has provoked controversy and banter throughout the new-media world: the company pays most writers at a base rate but then adds a bonus for every thousand page views a single post pulls in. The bonuses will continue to the end of 2008, but have been suspended for the first quarter of 2009 at the least.

Equally controversial has been some of the blogs' own content, which countless pundits have criticized for being puerile, mean, and occasionally invasive. But in New York, where Gawker Media has been arguably the most successful new-media start-up story of the past decade, the layoffs can only be described as unfortunate and sad: its writers and business staff are valued members of the blogging community and Gawker Media's downtown offices have become a popular hangout and party space.

Gawker Media is still, for all intents and purposes, doing well. Advertising revenue and traffic are both up. Laying off staffers is a preventive measure, Denton said. "The credit crisis is clearly going to affect every sector of the economy," he wrote. "Advertising buys typically plunge after the Christmas shopping season, and 2009 is obviously going to be exceptionally difficult. We have to prepare for the worst, now, rather than when the worst comes upon us."

The cuts have hit the Gawker-owned Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag hard: editor Owen Thomas wrote that he has laid off 60 percent of his editorial staff, bringing its total number of bloggers down to only two.

The new hires will flesh out the teams at some of the company's more profitable blogs--feminist-focused Jezebel, sports blog Deadspin, gaming title Kotaku, and the most recent addition to the company's network, sci-fi blog io9. And former W magazine staffer Gabriel Snyder will take the helm at flagship title Gawker, which Denton himself has been editing since a handful of resignations last year.

Denton has been notoriously frugal with his blog network, this spring selling off three of the company's less profitable blogs; in 2006, Gawker Media went as far as shutting down two blogs that had not lived up to expectations.

This post was last updated at 11:21 a.m. PDT.

This post was updated at 8:46 a.m. PDT.

New York blog czar Nick Denton, founder and publisher of Gawker Media, is selling three of the new-media company's properties: Idolator, Gridskipper, and Wonkette.

In an internal e-mail obtained by CNET News.com, Denton explained the sale: "To be blunt: they each had their editorial successes; but someone else will have better luck selling the advertising than we did."

When asked via instant message to comment on prices, Denton replied with "Nope!"

Music blog Idolator will be sold to Buzznet, the pop culture social-media site that has been snapping up content creators like Stereogum; editor Maura Johnston will stay at the helm. The deal, per Silicon Alley Insider, was reportedly completed over the weekend.

Gridskipper, an urban travel blog, will become part of Curbed, the blog network run by former Gawker Media editor Lockhart Steele (and in which Gawker Media has invested).

Of the three, the sale of Wonkette likely came as a surprise to longtime Gawker Media fans. "Wonkette is one of the brands with which the company is most associated; people will be shocked that we would ever part with it," he wrote. "The political site has won an array of Bloggies and other awards; it introduced (an expletive that CNET News.com cannot print) into the dictionary of political abuse; the founding editor (Ana Marie Cox)'s slippers are even on display in the new media museum in Washington, D.C."

The snappy political gossip blog Wonkette, with Cox at the helm, famously outed the "Washingtonienne," an anonymous D.C. sex blogger who dished a little too much dirt about political heavy-hitters. Now it'll be run by current editor Ken Layne as part of the Blogads network, which encompasses a number of other political titles like DailyKos.

Gawker Media has had plenty of successes, like the gadget blog phenomenon Gizmodo and feminist-culture title Jezebel. Its eponymous flagship title continues to be a mildly infamous mainstay of New York media gossip.

But Denton acknowledged that economic conditions are tightening the company's belt. In the middle of 2006 "we declared we were 'hunkering down," he wrote. "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."

New trend in New York media: White People Trying To Look Serious. Clockwise from left: Gawker Media's Nick McGlynn, Richard Blakeley, Dealbreaker.com's John Carney, budding Tumblr trendsetter Katie Baker

(Credit: Nick McGlynn/Randomnightout.com)

In the tech world at large, Gawker Media video producer Richard Blakeley is better known for getting kicked out of events than organizing them himself--he's the guy who was served a lifetime ban from the Consumer Electronics Show after running around shutting off displays.

Around New York, however, people tend to regard Blakeley as a good-natured Randy Quaid lookalike rather than a controversial hardware prankster. So when he announced that he was kick-starting a series of monthly get-togethers called "Media Meshing," people jumped on the bandwagon. The inaugural event was held on Thursday night at a bar in the Nolita neighborhood (that refers to North of Little Italy, the boutique-and-wine-bar-saturated enclave sandwiched between SoHo and the Lower East Side) called Sweet and Vicious, just a few blocks from Gawker's new headquarters on Elizabeth Street.

"Tech people really only hang out with other tech people," Blakeley related to me on Friday when I asked him why he started Media Meshing, "and that's a shame because the male-to-female ratio on that is totally wacky." Whether or not his assertion about the insideriness of the city's Web 2.0 set was accurate, Blakeley decided to do something about it: throw a party, invite his friends from tech and media, whether they knew each other or not, and put up an open invitation on Facebook.

"I sent an invite to nearly all of my 150 (Facebook) friends. About 20-30 replied and I thought, 'Awesome, cool.' But then something happened," Blakeley continued. "It started popping up in people's News Feeds and then each day, 10 people would sign up... (Each time) I saw that fewer and fewer people had any common Facebook friends with me. That turned out to be the best thing. What I feared would be a bunch of PR d***wads crashing my party was actually bringing old media and new media together."

The end result was that dozens of folks from every clique of New York's tech and media community showed up, from newspapers to blogs to tech start-ups. That basically means that there was an extremely high concentration in the room of Tumblr bloggers, Muxtape listeners, and people who know what Hell Square is. (Here's Dan Frommer's take from the Silicon Alley Insider.)

Indeed, one of the most prolific discussion topics of the evening was something entirely too insidery for its own good: the identity of the blogger behind Nick Denton's Brain Droppings (warning: content probably not work-safe), an anonymous Tumblr blog purporting to be written by the Gawker Media czar. Unlike his predecessor Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Nick doesn't write about celebrities. He writes both made-up and probably-not-made-up stuff (almost all of it extremely crass) about mundane Gawker employees and other New York bloggers, implying that the writer behind Fake Nick is extremely familiar with the intricacies of the local new-media culture, perhaps a little too much so. From what it seems like, more than a few people might be uncomfortable with just how much the guy knows and how much he'd be willing to say about, oh, extramarital affairs.

The funny thing is that, considering the odds, Fake Nick Denton was likely in the room. Real Nick Denton actually was. I have a theory that they're one and the same.

The evening also spawned a new blogging endeavor, hatched by Katie Baker and launched by Blakeley: the White People Trying To Look Serious photo blog. A takeoff on the wildly popular Stuff White People Like ("white people" is a moniker for Gen-X-and-Y yuppies who worship Target and microbrews, not the Caucasian race), the blog promises to showcase plenty of photos of pasty urbanites giving the camera their best Blue Steel.

Lolcats were getting old, anyway.

AUSTIN, Texas--If you run a social media site, from a blog to a virtual world to a network like Facebook, you're going to have to deal with angry users, and that's a fact of life.

Such was the theme of the discussion at a South by Southwest Interactive panel on Saturday afternoon called "Social Network Coups: The Users are Revolting."

The all-female panel (a rarity in the tech world!) was moderated by Annalee Newitz, editor of the Gawker Media-owned science fiction blog IO9.com, and consisted of Jessamyn West of MetaFilter, Gina Trapani of fellow Gawker Media blog Lifehacker, and Jeska Dzwigalski of Linden Labs, creator of virtual world Second Life.

"What happens when people on a social network or who are part of some kind of Web service become disgruntled or pissed off with the people who are running that service, and how can they make themselves heard in a way that is effective and nondestructive?" Newitz asked semi-rhetorically. The hour-long panel aimed to touch upon both how users can effectively mobilize and how online community organizers can deal with it. Ultimately, it focused primarily on the latter.

Newitz explained that there are at least three very separate kinds of users revolts on social-media sites. First, she said, there are "anarchist-style pranks" like the one she once rigged on social news site Digg as fodder for a Wired magazine story. "I wanted to find out if I could buy votes on Digg and get something really stupid on the front page," she related, talking about how she paid a shady company to power a fake blog she created to the front page of Digg "to show how easy it would be to buy votes on Digg."

She also talked about "grassroots rebellions," like the mass chaos that ensued when Digg users posted the crack key for high-definition DVDs' digital rights management technology and the site's executives pulled it down. They then retracted their decision in the wake of user protests that crippled the site's servers. "I would call that a genuine grassroots result," Newitz said.

Finally, there are "high-profile people claiming to speak for a larger community in a public forum," like the open letter that a small group of Digg users posted to criticize new changes to the site and ultimately was part of the reason why executives Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose kicked off a series of "town hall" discussions with users. Alternately, there's the controversy over Facebook's Beacon advertisements that resulted in loads of high-profile press on behalf of liberal activist group MoveOn.org but ultimately flew under the radar of many of the huge social network's users.

"Second Life is kind of built for user revolts," Dzwigalski said, explaining that there are all kinds of rebellions in the virtual world, but that the most visible are the ideology-fueled demands like the "revolts" that took place in 2003 when Linden Labs attempted to tax Second Life users and the 2006 controversies over a piece of software called CopyBot in which many in-world retailers shut down their businesses for a day.

The overall gist of the panel seemed to indicate that user revolts can be extremely annoying and difficult to manage, but ultimately an important part of a social-media site's evolution. Dwsigalski said the CopyBot controversy "led to greater transparency from the company to the community because people were demanding to know how changes impacted the (Second Life) economy."

"We have this kind of hippie trust thing going on," Jessamyn West said of MetaFilter, a moderated group blog with 35,000 users that lets anyone contribute for a $5 registration fee. Since the community is overwhelmingly made up of young white males, sexism issues have become high-profile, from "I'd hit it" remarks about pictures of female users to more serious harassment issues that have caused some users to ditch the site entirely. "I wake up every morning and I tell boys on the Internet to stop calling each other names," West joked.

Most of the time, these user revolts never really go away. Sexism on MetaFilter, for example, remains controversial. "I have enemies on MetaFilter," West explained and said that she'd made a promise to change her MetaFilter username to the racy slang term "cooter" if the site went a month without any "I'd hit it" remarks. "That's been in place since November and I'm not worried," she said.

Trapani's account of a user revolt was a bit different; she talked about what happened when a toiled company bought ad space on Lifehacker. "Their ad campaign involved butts. Smiling butts," Trapani said bluntly, and said that she received several dozen e-mails from readers who weren't particularly happy about seeing, um, naked behinds. Many were concerned about what might happen if the ads showed up at the workplace or if readers' children happened to be within viewing distance.

Then discussion of the "smiling butts" started to overtake comment threads, and Trapani finally negotiated to have the ads removed from Lifehacker--though they remained on Gawker Media's racier sites. "We didn't feel good about mooning our readers all day long," Trapani commented.

Discussion briefly touched the debate surrounding the Anonymous hacker group, which has used many social media sites to promote an agenda critical of Scientology. West talked about that sort of debate on MetaFilter, and said that debate was welcome but that zealots who couldn't talk about anything else were not. "We had Tom Cruise's lawyers after once us," she said.

See more stories in CNET News.com's coverage of SXSWi (click here).

Now this is kind of cool. Chris Mohney, editor of the Gawker Media travel blog Gridskipper, has compiled a guide to "New York blogger bars," a list of watering holes where members of the digital press have been known to go and blow their meager salaries on booze.

Like the blog's earlier guide to "Nerdy New York," it's fairly accurate. I've been to the majority of establishments on the list, and typically each visit was in the company of other bloggers and new-media journalists. (Believe it or not, I do hang out with non-bloggers sometimes.) But if you're an eager visitor expecting to run into the bloggers whose snark you subsist on daily, or a not-so-eager visitor hoping to avoid obnoxious writers at all costs, Gridskipper's guide won't necessarily help you much. You're not guaranteed to run into bloggers at any of these bars, nor are you guaranteed to not run into them elsewhere. Mohney's list really might as well be called "preferred bars of the Gawker-Gothamist-Curbed crowd," because as an older New York Observer article points out, that was New York's blogger scene not so long ago.

(And these are bloggers we're talking about. Of course they like to navel-gaze.)

Not suprisingly, most bars on the list are clustered around the Lower East Side zone that local blogs have dubbed "Hell Square," which is not only filled with cheap bars (by New York standards) for writers on a budget, but is also within staggering distance of SoHo, where a sizable number of New York's new media companies are based--including Gawker Media, Gothamist, and Curbed.

But over the past few years, as digital media has matured, there are a whole lot more bloggers to be found and the blogger culture in New York is consequently much more diverse. The most glaring problem I found with Mohney's list is that only one Brooklyn bar, the digital-art space Galapagos, made the list; Brooklyn is practically crawling with bloggers (they even have their own Meetup!) and I certainly hope they don't all feel forced to cross over to Manhattan to find beer.

And meanwhile, blogger culture has expanded from its SoHo-LES roots, and especially on cold days, cranky writers will want happy hour to be closer to the workplace. CNET's New York office is located in the Flatiron District, as are some start-ups like the digital-business blog Silicon Alley Insider. Not to mention the fact that most of the city's newspapers and magazines now employ bloggers, too, and the majority of those companies are headquartered a decent distance from the Lower East Side.

Mohney even admits his forgivable short-sightedness. "This list is neither comprehensive nor fair," he wrote, "as bloggers will drink most anywhere really."

But here's one that really should've made the cut: the distinctively named East Village faux-monastery called Burp Castle, a perpetual bar of choice for local video bloggers. That is, however, a very different social set. (New York is all complicated like that.)

This post was updated at 9:11 a.m. PST with comment from Nick Denton.

Facebook isn't too happy with Gawker Media founder Nick Denton over some screenshots of a member's profile that he posted on Gawker.com on Tuesday, Portfolio.com reports. The social-networking site reportedly plans to send a warning letter to the New York-based digital-media entrepreneur citing several terms-of-service violations--one more, and he's out.

Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

On Tuesday, Denton--who took over as managing editor of Gawker.com this month after several staff departures--posted a bit of an expose on 25-year-old Emily Brill, daughter of New York publishing figure Steve Brill. Screenshots of the younger Brill's Facebook profile, featuring glamorous photos of a yachting trip to the British Virgin Islands, as well as excited "status" messages about an impending trip to the Caribbean luxury getaway of St. Barth's, were juxtaposed with an older photograph of the Brown graduate when she was significantly heavier.

It was just plain mean--meaner than the time when Slate revealed via Facebook screenshots that Rudy Giuliani's daughter was a Barack Obama fan--but that's Gawker's style, and that's what made the media gossip blog rise to fame.

Facebook, however, considers it a violation of the site's terms of use, and according to the Portfolio.com blog post, the social network is prepared to give Denton's account the axe.

Facebook's terms of use stipulate that members "may not upload or republish site content on any Internet, intranet or extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation."

It's not clear whether Denton and Brill are "friends" on the site, or if it was even Denton (rather than a source or another Gawker Media employee) who pulled the screenshots from Facebook. But both Denton and Brill are members of the New York regional network, so there is a chance that Denton would have been able to view Brill's profile even without being connected as friends.

Perhaps due to the Gawker incident, Emily Brill's Facebook profile is no longer publicly searchable. It's a pertinent lesson: without privacy controls in place, you never know who might come across your photos and personal information. Those "regional" networks are big, and they allow anyone to join; and there are, as we've seen, plenty of people on the Web who are willing to circumvent terms of service.

Facebook is notoriously protective of its user data; profiles are only visible to logged-in members who belong to common "networks" or have approved friend requests. For various reasons, accounts are likely banned all the time, but it's been only recently that we've seen some extremely high-profile Web personalities feeling the heat.

Earlier this month, blogger Robert Scoble's account was temporarily banned when he used a test script from contact management site Plaxo in an attempt to transport his Facebook contacts' information to his Plaxo account.

(Other community sites have also been known to take terms of service extremely seriously; Wikipedia banned comedian Stephen Colbert when the Comedy Central host pranked the site and crashed its servers.)

For the notoriously unapologetic Gawker Media, having just brushed off the dust from last week's Gizmodo video incident at the Consumer Electronics Show, this will probably just be a bump in the road--and the site's livelihood certainly doesn't depend on Facebook screenshots. The company emerged unscathed from an incident last year in which YouTube banned a Gawker-affiliated account because it had been uploading copyrighted content interspersed with Gawker ads.

But the Denton incident does raise legitimate questions for bloggers and journalists; the Gawker founder indeed went too far by posting semiprivate profile data from someone who was otherwise not a public figure, but can information found behind Facebook's login wall be used as legitimate source material? It's a debate waiting to ignite, but if Facebook has anything to say about it, user information will stay behind closed doors.

In an instant-message conversation on Wednesday, Denton passed the Portfolio blog post off as fueled by personal beef. The writer of the original story, Denton said, was "trying to get his retaliation in first, because we're working on a story about him."

(Yeah, everything they told you about New York media? It's pretty much true.)