The Congressman, the Scoop, and the Redeemed Gawker Redesign

Redemption, or something like it, has come quickly to Nick Denton. His new look for Gawker—a makeover from a traditional blog layout, à la Daily Dish, into a Web magazine presentation, à la Slate—was so poorly received when it rolled out on Monday that on Tuesday morning, Denton calmed his staff in an internal memo. “Stay cool,” he told them, “we’ve been through worse backlashes.”

Then came Wednesday, and with it, the exact sort of scoop that this new site was designed to highlight. Ben McGrath, who wrote about Denton’s blog empire for the magazine, had spoken with Denton last year about his redesign plans. Explaining Denton’s conceit, McGrath wrote:

The problem with publishing some stories that are two thousand times as important as others is that it no longer makes sense to display them in reverse chronological order. His sites will soon abandon the scrolling layout in favor of a more conventional front page that is dominated by images and headlines.

As it turned out, it took less than three days for the perfect image (shirtless flexing politician) and headline (“The Craigslist Congressman”) to splash their way across the top of the homepage, signalling to readers their two-thousand-fold importance, causing a Congressman to resign, and earning Gawker another stroke on its tally of scoops and another high-step on, as McGrath calls it, its “march toward mainstream respectability.”