Com cuts staff as site focuses on politics

Gawker Media attracted more than 50 million unique users in the United States in September, according to comScore, and more than 100 million globally in October, according to Quantcast.

Denton said that the changes are part of an effort to provide “clear editorial missions” to Gawker.com and the company’s six other sites. “I can appreciate the wonky contrarianism of Ezra Klein’s Vox.com and high-metabolism micronews from Ben Smith’s Buzzfeed Politics”, he wrote.

Cook’s memo also announced the shuttering of several of the network’s verticals, including Gawker’s weather blog the Vane, until recently helmed by Dennis Mersereau. The site, wrote Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton, “will ride the circus of the 2016 campaign cycle, seizing the opportunity to reorient its editorial scope on political news, commentary and satire”.

Denton made other announcements in the memo as well. But no indication was given of a wholesale shift in focus to politics, a field already crowded with news operations from establishment brands like the Washington Post to upstart Politico. Alex Pareene, the site’s newly minted editor-in-chief, is a longtime political writer. “Unfortunately, Jay Hathaway, Jason Parham, Kelly Conaboy, and Taylor Berman, all of whom have been valuable assets in previous iterations of Gawker, will be leaving”.

Staffers at Gawker.com found out who was getting laid off by monitoring which Slack accounts were being disabled, according to an anonymous source quoted by The Awl.

The changes were prompted by a close examination of the company this year. Last summer, shortly after announcing that the company would form a union, Mr. Denton threw a party to celebrate not having to spend the summer in Florida after the Hulk Hogan lawsuit was postponed. In July, Gawker was criticized for running an article about a married male executive apparently seeking a liaison with a male escort.

The company also will be shelving plans to license Kinja, its troubled publishing technology backbone.

Well, at least there will finally be a place on the Internet to read about politics during the election season.