Gawker, ever restless in restructuring its infrastructure, is stepping back from the stream
Even though it’s very nearly a senior citizen in online news terms, you have to admire Gawker’s willingness to regularly rethink fundamental aspects of its structure. Significant redesigns and rethinkings come once a year or so, and they’re a good window into how some smart people are thinking about the state of online publishing at any given moment.
Today’s moves, announced by editor Max Read:
Starting today, gawker.com is going to slow down. Don’t worry—as an editorial operation, we’ll still be producing as much writing as we did before (probably even more). We’re just going to put less of it on the front page.
Instead of publishing the majority of our stories directly to the front page, we’ll be publishing them on to a set of subject-focused sub-blogs (a.k.a. “verticals,” or, cutely, “diagonals”—I personally prefer to just borrow newspaper terminology wholesale and call them “sections”). Some of them—Valleywag, Defamer, Morning After—already exist. Others—focused on media, news, and politics—we’ve created.
You will want to click out to that link - there’s a pretty important metamorphosis towards video going on at Facebook and Nieman takes note…