Jeff Bercovici Interviews Gawker’s Nick Denton About the Dialogue: Wednesday Focus: February 26, 2014

As we attempt to figure out how to carry out a proper technocratic dialogue in the public sphere of the future, one of the people we pay very close attention to is Nick Denton:

Jeff Bercovici: The Playboy Interview: A Candid Conversation with Gawker’s Nick Denton: “BERCOVICI: You’ve said the mission of Gawker is to publish the stories that journalists talk about with one another in private but never write.

DENTON: Yeah, the founding myth of Gawker happens to be true. I was… at the Financial Times… struck by the gap between the story that appears in the paper the next day and what the journalist who wrote that story will tell you about it after deadline… much more interesting—legally riskier, sometimes more trivial, and sometimes it fits less neatly into the institution’s narrative. Usually it’s a lot truer. The very fact that a journalist will ask another journalist who has a story in the paper, “So what really happened?”—now, just think about that question. It’s a powerful question…. We need reader help. If we’re covering you, we need your colleagues to rat you out or your exes to put in bits and pieces. It has to be a collaborative effort….

When people take a look at the change in attitudes toward gay rights or gay marriage, they talk about… celebrities who came out…. But even more powerful are all the friends and relatives, people you know… no longer some weird group of faggots on Christopher Street…. My presumption is the internet is going to be… big…. You’re going to be bombarded with… information, humanity, texture…. The internet is a secret-spilling machine, and the spilling of secrets has been very healthy for a lot of people’s lives.

And a doubter:

Karen Fratti: Gawker’s Kinja Platform: Please Don’t Make Me Blog for You: “It finally happened. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a bit of a Gawker groupie and I’ve been waiting for the rollout of Kinja on all of their sites.

Not because I am an avid commenter (that requires more dedication than I can give), but because I wanted to see how it was going to work from the sidelines. I have mixed feelings…. Commenting and Community…. Kinja and Nick Denton don’t want you to just read. Goodness, no. Not only do they want ‘users’ (alas, not ‘readers’) to comment, they want them to blog and curate…. That’s great for monetization opportunities, and the idea is that staff writers link to just regular old people’s posts and profiles…. They even help you write a good headline…. It seems too utopian to actually work. And it’s not really about gathering everyone around the fire for a group post-a-long–it’s about being able to use content for free and be able to post advertisements and sponsored links on them…

And more:

DENTON: This country, even in the tech sector, is full of people who are on this merry-go-round, who know the right headhunters and basically pass each other jobs as if they were a trade union with the sole rights to these positions in which they demand $500,000 a year. They move around from start-up flip to start-up flip. They’re not incompetent; they’re just not that good. These are the midlevel scandals. If you can industrialize gossip, if you can make it truly scale, you can expose all the mediocrity and incompetence…. People would actually have to work, and they’d have to be good. It would be great. Do you know how many lies there are?… Permanent revolution. Nothing is sacred. The United States is distributed; it’s resilient. There’s lots of redundancy built in, and it’s big enough that no establishment can control everything.

BERCOVICI: If you’re Jeff Bezos, what do you do with The Washington Post?

DENTON: Obviously you apply the Amazon recommendation engine. The interesting move would be to see whether you could take an entire newspaper-reading population and wean them off print. The price of Kindles is coming down. How much would it cost to bundle a Kindle with your subscription to The Washington Post? Discontinue the print and, as a gift, give everybody a Washington Post reader that can also buy books for them. That’s what I’d do. That’s what Bezos would do if he were ballsy.