Apr
13
Guest Blogger: Laura Dawson
April 13, 2009 |
My name is Laura D and I am a Gawker addict.
In fact, I am a Gawker commenter. (Handle: ljnd2, Avatar: Limecat.)
I began reading Gawker in 2004. It’s been interesting to watch the site morph over the years, particularly since the introduction of comments – now editors don’t even always write a whole post, but simply throw up a semiotic reference and then stand back and watch the commenters riot. In fact, much of the value of Gawker is the back-and-forth among commenters – which has bled over into real life: there have been meetups in Manhattan, romances, and even one marriage.
So addicted to Gawker am I that I recently paid money to get a subscription to the blog for my Kindle – figuring if I’m out and about in the city, without access to laptop, I can still keep up with everything.
Imagine my shock to find that the Kindle subscription does not include comments.
Given how Gawker’s tailored the blog to its commenter audience over the years, and how crucial commenters are to the atmosphere of the site, it’s an egregious omission. In many cases, the posts make absolutely no sense without the comments that ensue. Commenters bring context, outright knowledge, and (of course) hilarity. Gawker commenters in particular can be brutal, sharp, witty, scornful, blithe, and penetrating.
Some find this disturbing. The interaction of regular people (albeit generally smart, media-savvy, New York-centric regular people) with the news is off-putting to those who are accustomed to delivering news and then leaving the room.
Gawker is not The New York Times. It is not NBC Nightly News. If an editor posts a story, and the commenters find his/her tone offensive, they will say so, usually with the sort of creative cursing one normally associates with pirates.
Sometimes the editor will even apologize.
All of which is to say, Gawker editors post with a profound awareness of their audience. It’s an incredibly interesting form of writing – not preaching to the choir, exactly, but writing for a well-defined group of people whose responses, while not utterly predictable, are being accounted for.
Traditional media, as we know (and this includes books), is a top-down form of communication. But what we see in Gawker, and what we begin to see elsewhere in blogs such as Politico, New York Magazine’s Intel, Gothamist, and others, is an almost consensual form of writing. It’s not crowdsourcing – the commenters are not in charge of the content – but it is a dialogue.
The mantra, of course, is “it’s about community”. But that community is not necessarily managed in an autocratic way – rather, it’s nourished, it’s grown carefully (Gawker DOES engage in commenter “executions” – banning – for all sorts of reasons: offensive comments, tone-deafness, sheer stupidity, and pissing people off). Not only do the commenters support one another and the editors (there’s loads of love for Richard Lawson, for very good reason), the editors respond to the commenters and respect them.
In other words, Gawker’s Dark Overlord Nick Denton has figured out that the community cannot be controlled – shouldn’t be controlled – by the brand. The community is enabled and expressed by the brand.
That’s something a lot of companies – traditional media companies, book publishers, etc. - miss. You can’t define your community – the community is going to define itself. When you go out into the open web, you can’t – beyond certain qualifications – control who joins your club. And if you want to control who joins your club, you’re going to have a hard time finding people who want to join it.
You have to trust your community – trust that it likes your brand enough to respect it, trust that it will provide you with revenue. And that’s a big leap for media properties who are used to telling readers what to think.
I’m cancelling my Kindle subscription to Gawker – it’s pretty pointless. I’ll just have to wait till I get home and spend time catching up on what I’ve missed. But Amazon needs to think about what it’s providing – increasingly, media isn’t just what the broadcast is saying; it’s what the readers are saying as well.
Laura Dawson
“I’ve been in the book industry since 1986 and have been an independent consultant since 2003. I help the book business come to grips with how technology is affecting it. My practice originated with publishers and service providers, but I am now taking my skills to authors directly.”
Visit Laura’s website here.