There is also a roof made for hosting parties with bands and Ping-Pong tables.ĭenton’s receptionist sits beneath a large digital screen known as the Big Board, which lists the ten best-performing posts across the company network these are determined by the number of new readers-as opposed to returning obsessives-in the previous hour. Roughly sixty of the company’s hundred and twenty staffers work on-site, sitting at three long rows of desks alongside Denton himself-who, in the fashionable mode of modern media executives, declines a corner office. They now make good money, sometimes in excess of eighty thousand dollars, with 401(k)s, and, soon to come, maternity leave (not that many of them yet need it). Nonetheless, two years ago Denton, who is forty-four, set up a permanent base for the operation in a large loft in Nolita, which he increasingly shows off, as if to demonstrate that his bloggers do not wear pajamas all day long. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) It also helped bolster Denton’s image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator-he initially paid his bloggers twenty-four thousand dollars a year-and cultivated a helpful sense among contributors that they were the crew of a rogue “pirate ship,” as Gawker people sometimes say, initiating stealth attacks on the ocean liners in midtown. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. They want cell phones, lunch breaks, beer on Fridays.’ ” Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose.
“ ‘If you have an office, people want stuff. “He said, ‘If you run it out of your house, then no one expects anything,’ ” Denton’s friend Fredrik Carlström, the film producer and adman, told me. Photograph by Max Vadukulįor years after starting Gawker Media, the online publishing network, in 2002, Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo. “I don’t have a huge amount of time for noble failure,” Denton says.
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