So says The Nation:

Gawker.com is a gossip blog best known for mocking Lindsay Lohan and generally lowering the level of discourse in the New York media world. But starting on December 4 the website put snark aside and helped instigate one of the most unlikely and successful labor campaigns of recent years. The sight of young, educated workers in the seismically unstable media industry using spontaneous online organizing to cope with innovative forms of corporate exploitation and disrespect throws a challenge to the labor establishment. Some see a new social movement being born.

Now we’ve heard it all.

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Love it:

It’s Master Lodwick day here at CDC (Calacanis dot com). Here’s the most accurate description of Gawker Media I’ve ever read:

Gawker’s premise is “people are bad”. It acts as if all humans are inherently awful. Any achievement is framed as an accident; a distraction from the achiever’s underlying depravity. This worldview is directly at odds with our city’s best and brightest. Nick, it won’t be easy to recruit someone better than Emily and Choire; as the months march on, the pool of creative youngsters who are willing to turn themselves into professional assholes will shrink. If you would like to reverse Gawker’s premise and turn it into something else entirely, we should talk. A publication that celebrates excellence instead of negating it could be a big hit in the near future.

In fact, this is better description of Nick Denton than Gawker itself. Nick clearly was not loved enough as a baby, and was frequently teased as a child I’m told. He was odd and awkward as a young adult, and even today his cool facade only covers up 80% of his true need: to be loved–by anyone. Read more…

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“Whatever Gawker originally set out to do, it kind of did, and now it just feels over. I would love it if it just fell off the face of the earth,” departing editor Emily Gould tells WWD today.

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Editors Emily Gould, Joshua David Stein and Choire Sicha, right-hand man to Nick Denton, quit the Gawker empire suddenly last week, and Denton’s new pay-per-pageload philosophy has dramatically riled the editorial sides of the company’s fourteen blog sites.

“Choire’s departure as managing editor, and that of his blogger protégés, will obviously be a complete pain,” Denton told the NY Times. “But we’ve been through it before, three times, and this change of the guard does give us the opportunity to accelerate the transformation of Gawker from cute blog to fully-fledged news site.”

Their departures come just weeks after popular editor Alex Balk left for Radar and associate editor Doree Shafrir left for the Observer.

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Big Head NYC has learned that Benjamin Nicholas, the infamous male escort who allegedly had some sort of relationship with Sen. Trent Lott, is pretty close to Nick Denton, owner of the Gawker Media empire. In fact, Nicholas said in an e-mail to our brother site that Denton was working hard behind the scenes to get him to release his allegations against Lott within one of the Gawker blogs, possibly Wonkette.

“I was contacted by Gawker this morning.” Nicholas wrote on Monday. “Denton is a friend of mine.”

When asked via instant message by a Big Head NYC staffer about the connection to Nicholas, Denton quickly removed said staffer from his buddy list.

Interestingly, Denton’s Wonkette editors have said they won’t link to the Nicholas / Lott story.

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Page 6 got the Gawker Media crew all up in arms last weekend after publishing this tidbit about some pretty un-sexy staff relationships:

WHICH secret relationship between two editors at an online blog empire almost became public when the woman editor wrote unflatteringly about her hookup with an unnamed, but identifiable male editor on her own Web site? Her short-lived sex partner responded by posting a video of himself simulating sex with a dead fish - a commentary on her lack of animation in bed.

And for good reason. Big Head NYC has learned that it was Gawker’s own videographer Richard Blakely who did the nasty deed. Earlier, another blog had wrongly speculated that new Gawker editor Alex Pareene might be problem child. As if! That boy can’t even protect his own girlfriend, let alone be that creative!

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Why is the rich Gawker Media owner trying so incredibly hard to prove his alleged superiority?

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