NYO: Nick Denton is an IM-friendly club-runner
Jossip too quickly dismisses the New York Observer’s “Off the Record” feature on Nick Denton.
Tom Scocca’s story confirms Denton’s love for the LCD-and-keyboard mask:
Mr. Denton prefers to be an electronic presence himself. Asked, via instant message, to meet up and discuss Gawker Media, Mr. Denton gave phone numbers for staffers instead, then offered to conduct his share of the conversation via IM.
“IM is so much more me,” Mr. Denton wrote.
“You know,” he added, “I haven’t met a couple of our writers.” …
“Nick is a semi-detached character in a lot of ways,” [Denton's former boss at the Financial Times John] Gapper said.
He was a dedicated reporter—”not a great writer as a stylist, I would say; he’s very good at working contacts and very good at extracting information out of people.”
The story, besides pointing out his biggest body part (hey now), points out his biggest talent:
The comments group, Mr. Denton wrote in an instant message, is “like the effort to create a New York nightlife institution. Invite in too many people, and the cool kids will move on. You want them to bring their friends, but not too many of them.”
Nick Denton was building a media elite for the electronic age, as he has for two decades. For, one way or another, he’s been engineering social circles since he was at Oxford in the 1980’s. “He likes to be the center of the carousel,” said Financial Times business columnist John Gapper, Mr. Denton’s former boss at that newspaper and his co-author on a book about the collapse of Barings Bank. “Somebody said, at university what Nick was very good at was [running] a club.”
Later, in London in the 90’s, Mr. Denton created a networking group for tech-industry members called First Tuesdays—which he and his co-founders sold for a reported $50 million in 2000.
By page 3, the article expands its focus to Gawker Media, noting its regularity of content flow (”replacing amateur bloggers’ intermittent, as-the-mood-strikes postings”) and its “unified and stripped-down industrial approach.”
Finally, a shout-out to his fans:
“I’ve stopped reading blogs,” Mr. Denton said. He’d stopped what now? “I’ve stopped reading all the blogs about blogs,” he qualified. “It just annoys me too much, so I don’t read it.”
Damn it.
This entry was posted by Nick Douglas on Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 at 7:41 pm and is filed under David Hauslaib, Gawker Media, Jessica Coen, Nick Denton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
