One law of media competition applies as strongly to web properties as it did to their predecessors: scoops drive audience growth. Gawker Media experienced that rule, painfully, as Harvey Levin's TMZ eclipsed our overly bloggy Hollywood site, Defamer. TMZ's growth was built upon three gigantic stories: Mel Gibson's meltdown; Michael Richards' racist outburst; and Michael Jackson's death...We learned our lesson: aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging.
Denton also explains that much of Gawker's most popular stories are spread by Facebook and Twitter, something that has been experienced at Zennie62.com. Indeed, it's because of Facebook and Twitter that Zennie62.com has been able to sustain being off Google News, suffering about a 10 percent traffic drop, whereas other sites were impacted as much as 90 percent.
Associated Press Is Not Only News Originator
Something else important to add. Denton did not state this, but The Associated Press isn't the only originator of news. Even as The Associated Press seems to have convinced Google News otherwise. The fact is The AP's four-year old work to diminish blogs and bloggers via accusations of content theft, have chased many away from the AP. Meanwhile, AP fails to do what it asks blogs and bloggers to do, link to them.
For example, one experience this blogger has had as a CityBrights blogger at SFGate.com, is that TMZ would run a scoop on a celebrity, and rather than use TMZ, SFGate would wait for The Associated Press version of the same story.
When The Associated Press version was released, it would not mention TMZ.com, let alone contain a link to the blog site.
With that, Google News working with The Associated Press should be considered an effort against blogs and blogging. All of that as Gawker moves more toward the issuance of original news. See a coming content war?
Stay tuned. Visit Gawker here for the whole Denton post.
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