Nick Denton Quotes

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn’t cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.

Google demotes search results that don’t get clicked on.

I’ve never really understood people who climb socially by sucking up. It seems like the least efficient way to climb, and also the most psychologically debilitating.

Most good media come out of somebody saying, ‘This should exist; this is something I want to read.’

Web media needs to move to TV metaphor – with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.

There was a rivalry – and some pie-throwing. But that was probably because Gawker and Radar had more in common than they wanted to admit. Each was the other’s future. Radar served up the exclusives I always envied. Gawker was actually comfortable on the web, in the medium Radar should have made its own.

While I love the medium, I’ve always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses.

I regret the stories we didn’t do – the stories that we knew about and talked about but didn’t have all of, so didn’t publish. The whole idea of Gawker was to remove the barrier between the thought and the talk – and the page.

Google and others truncate headlines at 70 characters. On the Manti Teo story, Deadspin’s scoop fell down the Google search results, overtaken by copycat stories with simpler headlines. Deadspin’s headline was 118 characters. Vital information – ‘hoax’ – was one of the words that was cut off.

I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn’t the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you’re a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.

I want to institutionalise and automate chequebook journalism.

I have to come to terms with the paternalism of American business. Companies are expected to take on so many social responsibilities which are the province of the state in Europe.

An employer would be a complete fool to let an image like college partying influence their hiring decisions.

You know how the best story angles often spring from that thought you have on reading an article or watching a show – that thought you have before the responsible journalist in you comes up with something boring. I usually recommend people get in touch with their deep ‘reptilian brain.’

I don’t really mind playing tabloid monster. I always liked those characters in the old movies.

The most interesting comments, they don’t come from people with Klout scores. They don’t come from people with a history on our sites.

Forget about someone’s resume or how they present themselves at a party. Can they blog or not? The blog doesn’t lie.

Is there Gawker ethics? I mean, I guess there’s Gawker ethics. It’s a dangerous thing to talk about.

As a print journalist, if you hear a rumour you try to stand it up and if you can’t, the story dies. With a blog you can throw the rumour out there and ask for help. You can say: ‘We don’t know if this is true or not.’

The idea of harnessing the intelligence of the readership has been lost in the quest for Facebook likes. For many, readers have become synonymous with hateful commenters. It’s time for a renewed push to realize some of the original dreams of the web.

I think straight couples have a schedule: You’re together for two years and then there’s the ‘where is this going?’ question, which wouldn’t necessarily be good for everyone, but I think it’s pretty healthy for relationships, for there to be a presumption that there is a decision to be made.

It irritates me that everybody concentrates on Gawker, because it’s just one of 15 sites and it doesn’t even get the most traffic. It’s a significant site, but it’s not what we are.