New York City Bloggers - The Story

Karenuhoh does not remember how she first ran across gakwer.com, the notoriously snarky New York blog that bills its self as “the source for daily Manhattan media news and gossip.” What she does remember is becoming instantly hooked on the cutting and irreverent repartee and her desire to join the gaggle of commenters, seemingly New York City insiders, that weigh in on any of the thirty plus items posted on Gawker everyday.

“I was worried I’d be ripped apart by the other commenters,” said Karenuhoh, who agreed to be interviewed via e-mail and asked to be identified by the handle she uses on Gakwer. “I remember thinking my first comments were lame and tame. Then I went completely out-the-wazoo nuts.”

Karenuhoh, who has achieved certain notoriety among Gakwer readers by waxing prolific on all things New York, is not a media insider or a fixture on the Manhattan party circuit. She is an attorney in Chicago, Ill., and one among hundreds of thousands of readers who have been pulled into the blogosphere by high profile and highly successful New York blogs like Gawker and Gothamist.

There are estimated to be over six thousand blogs in New York City, according to metroblogging.com, an Internet start-up that specializes in city-based blogs. But few attract readers beyond the bloggers’ circle of friends and family. Fewer still draw a reliably large audience every day. And none have come close to cultivating the legions of obsessively loyal readers that have made Gawker and Gothamist so successful

It’s been called the ‘Gawker effect,’ the success of the New York blogs that became internet hotspots almost over night. They have done what no one else has, legitimizing the blog as a form of new media with casual narrative and clever commentary, garnering a cultish readership and a lasting audience.

“The recipe seems really simple and obvious to me,” says Choire Sicha, long-time contributor and current managing editor of Gawker. “The recipe is regularity and a little bit of flair and monotony of topics.”

Sicha has been a part of the New York blogosphere since the beginning, even before Gawker.com came on the scene. “I was just blogging for fun,” he said. “Cat blogging. Like, it was fairly personal.” And for several years, that’s how most bloggers were doing it – creating weblogs in the most traditional sense, as individual, online diaries.

By 2000, the number of New Yorkers blogging about their personal lives and interests was growing. “There was a big circle of gay bloggers, there was definitely a circle of black bloggers,” Sicha remembers, “but there were definitely, sort of geographic clumps.”

In fact, there was even a website that allowed bloggers to connect with each other by subway stop. “There used to be, like, five people at your subway stop, you’d be, like, ‘oh, them!’” remembers Sicha. “And then we used to get together back in the day. Before Gawker, before Gothamist, even. We used to meet up to hang.”

But after Sept. 11, the intense spirit of community that permeated New York converged with the rapidly growing Internet. The city’s blogging culture immediately reflected that change. “We had sort of a shift in blogging right then because all these people took to the Internet as political bloggers, or war bloggers, or whatever they called themselves, and suddenly, there was a vast inundation,” Sicha said.

There were more bloggers on the scene than ever in 2002 when Nick Denton founder of Gawker Media, met Elizabeth Spiers, a financial analyst and aspiring writer, at an Internet conference. The two became friends, and the next year, Denton approached her to collaborate with him on the blog that would become Gawker.

Denton had originally envisioned Gawker as an insider’s guide to New York, but Spiers had a different idea. “Initially, Nick was very opposed to the gossip orientation,” She recalled, "but the more we did it, it was clear it was what people wanted.” There were other pop culture bloggers out there, she remembers, but they lacked Gawker’s obsessive posting and relentless sass. “There really wasn’t anyone else in that category,” she said.

The next year, Jake Dobkin’s Gothamist did the same to city news. The first players in the deep end, both blogs had realized a recipe not only for survival, but for lasting readership. Dobkin soon launched versions of Gothamist carefully tailored to the local flavor of other major cities – DCist covers the Hill, while Austinist covers the indie music scene. Gawker Media, in turn, launched Wonkette for politics, Defamer for Hollywood, Fleshbot for the porn industry, and 12 others. But each incarnation followed the same formula: provocative, irreverent, riotous variations on a single theme.

“People want to know when the steam thing blows up and they want to know when someone gets fired at Conde Nast and they want to know when someone sleeps with someone,” Sicha said, and that’s what Gawker provides for its readers. And for that, they keep coming. On average, Gothamist gets about 300,000 visitors each month, while Gawker gets about 600,000. To put that statistic in perspective, Tiffany.com, the world’s third most popular jewelry site, runs fairly even with Gawker.com for traffic throughout the day. And Gawker isn’t selling diamond jewelry to brides-to-be perusing on their lunch hour; they’re just providing juicy reads.

But 600,000 “visitors” isn’t the total number of people who have actually visited the site – that number, measured by ‘unique views” or “hits,” can be easily skewed by sites using software that generates false views. A “visitor” is someone who actually spends some time on the site, leaves, and comes back later to check it again. It’s behavior professional bloggers especially value in their readers, according to Nicole Swetley of Hitwise, a company that operates like a Nielson ratings of the Internet.

“With all these blogs, they have what we call ‘comparison shopping,’ where they’re going back and forth and they have maybe their five blogs that they read,” She explained. So, when a reader comes back two hours later to see what’s happened since lunch, that’s something Gawker wants to know.

According to Sicha, that’s their audience. “If you look at our traffic,” he says, “it starts at nine a.m. and it peaks at two and three, and dies off at six.” But though Gawker traffic mirrors East Coast office time, it still grabs the attention of people all over the country and the world, the metrics show.

Over ten percent of Gawker viewers are international, which Sicha attributes to an almost universal interest in the lifestyle of New Yorkers. “It’s that there’s this ongoing narrative about New York,” he said. “And those of us that actually live here are interested in that narrative, and we’re interested in people’s careers, and people’s sex lives, and a few institutions and how they rise and fall.”

The ‘flair’ that makes Gawker such a compulsive read also represents a lowering of standards, Sicha admits. They largely ignore the careful sourcing and ethical rigor of conventional journalism. “I printed at least two things today that I was like, ‘Well, that’s probably true,’” he said.

Recently, Gawker posted “The Night I did Not Sleep with Cuba Gooding Jr”, a NYU co-ed’s account of a boozy evening with the very married Oscar winner. Running along side it was a decidedly cynical account of the media spectacle surrounding the Brooke Astor funeral, and even a sound bite of Mayor Michael Bloomberg joking about the late philanthropist’s penchant for pin-stripes.

Although Gawker is not the “Gray Lady” of online journalism, it has been successful long enough to be considered an Internet institution, one sources know they can trust when there is dirt to be dished. They proved that in 2004, when rumor had it that the FBI would bring charges against Sicha for refusing to name his source for a post on jury selection for the Martha Stewart trial. The charges never materialized, but, Sicha said, “If that did happen, which it wouldn’t, we would go the mattress.”

Still, he downplays the drama and insists that Gawker still plays by its own rules. Rules other companies are trying to follow.

Anthony Keegan, a 34-year-old designer for Donna Karen, recently signed with Turner Broadcasting to develop a New York-centric fashion blog based on the Gawker model. Turner hopes to capture the Internet readers sites like Gawker and Gothamist have enjoyed for so long. Turner, which is the parent company of Time Warner Inc., owns Time Magazine, In Style, and Entertainment Weekly among others. It is now launching business plans to recreate the alchemy of the Gawker effect with a number of niche blogs supported by online advertising.

Keegan says his blog will target women ages 25 to 32, ideally to attract companies such as Clairol and Garnier which have traditionally advertised in print. Turner plans to promote the blog alongside re-runs of “Sex and the City,” which it recently acquired from HBO. Sarah Jessica Parker has been a ubiquitous presence for years on T.V., billboards, and magazines, as both the star of the show and the spokesperson for Garnier’s line of hair care products. They are taking big business stars and applying their star power from the top down. If successful, their blog will be part of a lifestyle. Not the netroots kind of Gawker and Gothamist, but one that recreates that niche community and makes it mainstream.

“What we knew was happening ten years ago is now coming to fruition,” said Keegan of the magazine world’s struggle to compete with the web. He offers a simple litmus test of magazine survival in the digital age: If you want to take it on the plane with you today, it will still be around ten years from now.

“What we are realizing is that this is true of Vogue and GQ and the high-end market,” Keegan said. “It’s also true of Star and the National Enquirer on the low end; but everything in between will disappear.”

That’s where the Internet comes in. His market research indicates that people who are interested in reading about fashion want to feel a part of the action. Much like Karenuhoh indulging her obsession with the ‘famous-for-New York’ subculture from a law office in Chicago, his readers want to experience fashion week in Milan, even if the nine-to-five grind keeps them tied to their cubicles.

Bloggers, he says, now get VIP treatment in the fashion world like front row seats at runway shows. That’s the experience he wants to bring to his readers.

“It costs them nothing,” he said. “And when they are done, they can just click to the next site.”