Hugh is dead on:

[ from gapingvoid: nick denton disses bloggers]

Gawker Media's blog format notwithstanding, Nick is basically in a traditional, Old Media, advertising-funded biz model. The last thing his business needs is clients discovering blogging for themselves, or believing they can spend less money on advertising.

I like both Nick and Gawker Media, so if they're making a profit, all power to them. That being said, I really don't see what the big deal about nanopublishing is. With the advent of blogs, it's simply too easy for a writer to create their own brand/body of work without a publisher, without the controlled and compromising input of a third party. This is true with both small and large publishers, online and off. So why the Big Media fascination with Gawker?

I suspect the real reason is that it allows them to write about the blogosphere without having to mention the real, and for them, painful and depressing story, as summed up so eloquently by Clay Shirky last year:

So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.

There's nothing wrong with Big Media per se, they just have the same problem as Madison Avenue. Their product is extremely expensive to make, and they have no earthly clue how to realistically make it cheaper. Long-term that situation is untenable.