Gawker Media’s web measurement of choice is shifting from pageviews to unique users. That’s a pretty big deal for an organization that led the charge in pageview obsession. Gawker founder Nick Denton explained the refocusing in a staff memo:
The target is called “US monthly uniques.” It represents a measure of each site’s domestic audience. This [...]

Gawker Media is unveiling an innovative and unruly twist on traditional reader forums this morning. The new feature, part of an otherwise modest redesign across the company’s nine blogs, could transform tag pages, typically little more than archives of old posts, into commenter free-for-alls and transparent tip lines.
Readers are now greeted with a text box [...]

Eight months ago, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton was predicting a 40-percent drop in U.S. advertising and paring back accordingly: He laid off 19 writers and, by selling some blogs and consolidating others, shrank his blogging empire from 13 titles to 9. Well, that dire forecast hasn’t quite come to pass — least of all [...]

Expect Gawker Media’s latest advertising innovation to draw criticism, if not blood, when it sees daylight today. The blogging empire is temporarily welcoming a new site into its fold that’s written and paid for by HBO to promote the network’s noir vampire drama, True Blood. And the word “advertisement” won’t appear anywhere in the project’s [...]

On this Friday before the long weekend, we’ve put together five video tours of newsrooms that are new, innovative, or otherwise noteworthy. The first, above, is one I shot during a visit to Talking Points Memo earlier this month. Andrew Golis, deputy publisher of TPM, walked me around the site’s new loft on the seventh [...]

Last time we checked in with Talking Points Memo, which was December, the political news site planned to get serious about in-house advertising sales as it added reporters in Washington. Since then, TPM hired its first vice president of sales, Diane Rinaldo, and vastly accelerated the site’s advertising revenue. (Expanding in D.C. has not been [...]

What would Jeff Jarvis do? On Monday night, I asked the CUNY journalism professor and new-media evangelist how he would advise various news organizations that are struggling with old business models or experimenting with new ones. It was a rapid-fire exercise, and Jarvis, sporting a What Would Google Do? pin on his lapel, gamely offered [...]

Some 50 newspaper executives met in Reston, Va., Friday for the American Press Institute’s “Summit on Saving an Industry in Crisis.” McClatchy, Hearst, E.W. Scripps, and The New York Times Co. were there, along with many others. Did anything come of it? Well, they agreed to reconvene in six months, but media blogger Steve Outing [...]

— David Weinberger liveblogs a talk by Craig Newmark (of his List) at the Berkman Center. “Over the past several years, they’ve begun to understand why CL is successful. ‘It has to do with the culture of trust we have.’”
— In case you hadn’t noticed, Mark Potts points out that Wall Street doesn’t like newspaper [...]

Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker Media, has backed up his recent dire forecast of a potential 40-percent decline in advertising with a set of “doom-mongering” charts and graphs. His focus, naturally, is on Internet advertising — and he took his premonition to heart yesterday by consolidating two of his sites and putting a third up [...]

A new innovation for blogs sounds a lot like an old model for newspapers: Gawker unveiled a voice mailbox today for sources who don’t want to leave a digital trace of their gossip, leaked memos, and other tips. Publisher Nick Denton explained that “everybody’s more paranoid than ever that the boss’ IT agents are snooping.” [...]