Gawker Sheds Blog Status, Community - But Not Woes

A Day in the Life of Gawker Media - FINAL from source/record on Vimeo.

The much ballyhooed Gawker.com redesign rolled out on Monday, with Gawker Media czar Nick Denton saving his flagship website for last as he rolled out the redesign across his other sites first.

More than just a a simple change in the look of the blog, Gawker's new format has been billed as an outright battle over the future of media strategy. It has already claimed several top Gawker personnel, including his head of ad sales, not to mention some of the site's regular readers and commenters.

The redesigned sites, which started going live across the Gawker Media family in early February, have become embattled islands of complaints, with Denton fighting back and defending his new format. When Gawker.com relaunched the day after the Super Bowl, there were tech hiccups — to be expected in the wake of its recent hacking, perhaps — such as the new design losing its Google News status.

In further defense of his choices, Denton posted the above video. It was the final straw for many of the site's loyal readers — whose wit and commentary drove more pageviews and return visits than Denton may realize.

Rather than jump in right away, we thought we'd give this a few days to settle in because most redesigned websites — particularly for such a high-profile digital brand with an active and loyal community — are adverse to change.  

But today we see a smoking of opinions from still-outraged Gawker commenters, many of them bearing the loyalty badge of being starred by the site's editors:

Ouch. Indeed, many of the site's most avid readers and commenters have fled to Crasstalk — a site they created in advance of the redesign.

The pageview-driven Denton, meanwhile, doesn't seem too concerned. He has been responding all week to complaints via his Twitter feed that anyone can switch back to a "blog view" (not the original interface, but a list of stories vs. the single-story view). 

He also commented to one Twitter complain that he's not using the term "blog" any more: "we're changing from blog to news site."

More than that — Denton is trying to bring his bellwether web brands into the same consideration set for advertisers as TV network brands, with a similar ad model and business plan.

(Below, a video uploaded to YouTube this week by a Gawker reader.)