Just over a year ago we discussed on how “Robot journalists” (actually automated software designed to turn facts into readable copy) stood to threaten the jobs of writers in fields like sports reporting. It looks like the results are actually starting to become alarmingly good.

NPR’s All Things Considered reports how writers at Gawker’s sports site Deadspin assumed that a story written on GW Sports about a baseball game had been written by a robot due to its failure to mention that in the game, a player had pitched a perfect game in the NCAA for the first time in almost a decade – pretty big thing to miss.

It turned out that a human had in fact written that report, but the creators of news-writing software Narrative Science decided to take this as a challenge – could its software write a better account of the game? It turns out that yes, it could. This is what Deadspin was sent from the robo-journo:

“Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.

Twenty-seven Colonials came to the plate and the Virginia pitcher vanquished them all, pitching a perfect game. He struck out 10 batters while recording his momentous feat. Roberts got Ryan Thomas to ground out for the final out of the game.

Tom Gately came up short on the rubber for the Colonials, recording a loss. He went three innings, walked two, struck out one, and allowed two runs.

The Cavaliers went up for good in the fourth, scoring two runs on a fielder’s choice and a balk.”

Impressive, eh? It may not have much flair or personality, but it’s readable and accurate. Sports reporters should have real cause for concern, it seems. It’s easy to see how other data-heavy fields, such as financial reporting, may also see an influx of robot writers in the future.

I just hope it takes them a little longer to perfect the technology reporting algorithm – that might just be cutting a little too close to home for me…

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that Matters of Varying Significance notes that the original report from GW Sports was written by a human but not a trained sports journalist. That’s an important distinction that would explain the omission of an important piece of news from the report. Still, as a factual piece of writing the ‘robot’ still did an impressive job.

However, Gawker was not always so innovative. Their first designs were downright normal. In fact, the first two proposed designs for the website were a bit dull. Here, coming from the designer himself, is the first design submitted to Nick Denton for Gawker in October of 2002:

According to the designer: “Nick [Denton] didn’t like it too much. Background too dark, masthead text not logo-y enough. Two weeks later, I sent him this, with a half-assed technicolor logo that I’d dashed off in Photoshop in like 30 minutes:”

Look familiar? That became the first Gawker design to actually make it into the wild. This is what the site looked like when it was finally launched:

And finally, this is what Gawker looks like today, for better or for worse:

TNW has also gone through big design changes, but with the massively positive response that our current layout has garnered, you have little to fear in terms of us making the site harder to use. Which version of Gawker do you prefer?

Those who follow the insider-minutia of blogosphere news will recognize this same concept in Gawker Media’s new redesign. In numerous interviews, Gawker founder Nick Denton has highlighted the importance of the large splash post, often telling the anecdote of how Gizmodo had to stop publishing the day of the prototype iPhone scoop so that the article would stay at the top of the page (apparently he hasn’t heard of the WordPress plugin that allows you to keep a post at the top). Like Malkin, he and other Gawker editors will now choose a day’s most attention-worthy post while permitting users to scroll through the leftover junk on the right.

But while Malkin’s approach to this idea is clean and simple, the Gawker design is a mess. A pretty mess, but still a mess.

Let’s start with the sidebar. With Malkin’s blog, the side posts scroll down with the rest of the page. Gawker’s side posts can scroll independently from the rest of the site. This concept works in theory, but over the last few days I’ve found myself reading one post and accidentally moving my cursor slightly and finding myself in a completely different post. The same goes for the arrow keys on your keyboard; if you push up or down, the page scrolls with it, but god forbid you accidentally push the right or left arrow keys, both of which will automatically launch you to a new article. Not to keep comparing Gawker to Malkin, but her side posts also allow her to publish small thumbnail pictures and even subheaders, which are much better than simple headlines at pulling the reader’s eye toward the right of the blog. Gawker has the ability to publish pictures on its sidebar, but doesn’t for the vast majority of its posts.

The Gawker posts themselves aren’t particularly easy to read. You have to scroll past a large picture before even reaching the text of the article. Worst of all, Gawker’s comment section — long cherished for its witty contributions — is not intuitive. For at least a year now Gawker has tried to place emphasis on the best comments, but with the redesign it may not be immediately clear to a new reader that you have to click on “All” to read all of them. In the end, it just simply looks at first glance as if most posts only have one or two comments.

Many media critics note that Denton has history on his side, and I certainly agree. His staff memos, often leaked to Romensko, offer more insight on digital media and the future of news than 90% of Mashable articles. He has grown Gawker Media into a powerhouse that has left most of its blog brethren in its dust. But over the last few months he has issued several quotes about Gawker’s strategy that seem suspect. Recently, for instance, he claimed that Facebook is the only social media traffic driver of any worth and that Twitter is all but useless. True to form, the new design does not feature any social media sharing buttons other than Facebook’s. Whatever metrics Denton was using to make that calculation, he’s wrong. If you look at bit.ly click metrics, a piece published on a site like The Oatmeal or The Onion can get upwards of 50,000 clicks. And that only includes the Twitter users who use Bit.ly and not other shortening services. Gawker Media may be big, but it’s not so big that it can disregard 50,000 pageviews on a single article as useless. Yes, I agree that news sites can get a little too enthusiastic about including every social media icon, no matter how inconsequential, but you can’t deny Twitter’s ability to quickly and effectively spread content.

Speaking of Facebook, you would think a guy who considers it to be so important would design his site so you can actually link to its posts from your Facebook profile. I don’t know if this is a temporary glitch, but for the past few days I have literally not been able to post Gawker URLs into my Facebook news feed. Not only does Facebook not call up any headlines or images when you try to post a link, it doesn’t even recognize it as a proper URL. I currently get the below error message every time I try to post a Gawker link into my news feed:

In terms of traffic, we’ve already seen a downward trend in page views just in the few days since the redesign launched (though to be fair, Denton predicted an initial decrease as readers adjust to the site). For years, all Gawker Media blogs included their Sitemeter statistics for anyone who wanted to peruse them, but if they’re still available, I can’t find them. If they are actually gone, I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason is so that nosy media writers like me can’t constantly scrutinize them over the next few months.

Reading interviews with Nick Denton over the last year as he slowly released details about his guiding philosophy, I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about the mogul’s prognosis for the economics of blogging. The reverse-chronological website belongs in the kiddie pool, he seems to be saying. The users can’t be trusted to pick the most important posts; an editor must instead. But isn’t this simply the philosophy of every major print newspaper? Isn’t this the kind of thinking from which we’ve been moving away? Whatever happened to the idea that the front page is dead?

The other day former Gawker editor Gabriel Snyder said he was “on the record that I think the redesigns will fail. And I’m now officially opening the betting pool. I think Denton is going to be forced to pull back on this. If anyone wants to wager that the redesign don’t get yanked back (or greatly modified) by, let’s say, June 1… I’ll take your bet.” Well, Denton actually took that bet, and will base Gawker Media’s success or failure on this October’s traffic numbers.

In the past, I would have bet on Denton over any internet media mogul out there, but this time I’m not so sure. I remember reading in a few places that the Gawker redesign will negate the need for it to release any mobile apps. The site is supposed to look its slickest on a tablet computer. But while the redesign may be absolutely beautiful for your iPad, for the open web it’s a total, utter mess.

When news made the rounds this morning that three of Gawker Media’s sites were live with a re-design, it took me a few hours of having to deal with actual news to check it out, but when I did… what a pleasant surprise.

i09

My first reaction was one of oooing and aahing when I stumbled upon i09, Gawker’s future blog this morning. The re-design is clever. The stories are actually easier to read. The reader is greeted by a single story, and then a headline index of recent stories in purple with short descriptions in black type.

Not everyone likes it though… but at least John found a headline.

Gawker.TV

Then I visited Gawker.TV and the hipster designer in the flannel shirt who lives in my heart sang out loud. Very cool.

But over on Facebook, Gawker.TV is receiving mediocre reviews. Many users noted that auto-play on videos is jarring and they miss the thumbnails.

Jalopnik

To be honest, I didn’t even know this site existed. But then again I’m not really into cars, unless I am actually inside of them and driving very fast down the PCH with a hot boy at the wheel.

What’s changed?

Gawker’s emphasis on headlines. Gawker’s new site underscores the importance of headlines and emphasizes both quality and clarity, two qualities that are often swept under the rug in the fast-paced online world.

Gawker will only use Facebook to share articles because, as Nick Denton told the Observer, “These sites festooned with social media buttons—they look like primitive tribesmen clutching pathetically onto shiny baubles they believe to the symbols of modernity.” No Twitter share button? Boooo.

The sites are mobile friendly. In fact you could even say they have an “app” like feel. Also the reader no longer has to go back to the front page in order to scroll and find the next item. One fewer click makes reader happy.

Bottom Line? The sites feel lighter and are easy to quickly scan. The new re-design emphasizes big feature stories, which is great both for the reader and writer. It’s not a complete delivery of Denton’s earlier promises; for example I’m not seeing any “convergence of blog, magazine and television.” But it’s clean, slick and clever, and a definite step up from the pithy, up in your face feel of the older sites.

The reaction to their site’s re-design has been about 50/50. Sometimes change is hard to accept at first. Even with our own site, I was a little skeptical, but now I am in love and there’s no turning back. If you’re still grieving over Gawker Media’s new look, you can always switch back to the older version by adding /classic to the end of the URL.

What’s going on in your neighborhood? If you live in New York City, you can find out on Neighborhoodr’s local Tumblr built blog network.

If Craigslist is the modern day Classified section, then Neighborhoodr is its editorial component. It acts like a newspaper for each neighborhood, filled with little stories. In New York City, people move around a lot. (I’m only 26 and am now living in my 7th apartment in NYC.) There’s also a lot going on in New York and its inhabitants are notorious for wanting to share that information. Neighborhoodr provides local content for 60 New York City neighborhoods, so that wherever you are, or whenever you move, they’ve got a news local outlet for you to browse, contribute to and share.

Here’s how it works. Visit the Neighborhoodr site and pick your neighborhood, which takes you to the specific Tumblr blog. View the blog’s content or click the big red button to submit a post. Once you’ve submitted a post it will be added into a queue to pass by the eyes of one of Neighborhoodr’s 50 local moderators.

Gawker‘s Richard Blakeley and Reuters‘ Anthony De Rosa officially launched Neighborhoodr in September 2009. While Neighborhoodr doesn’t aim to be the go to place for political crises in the world, it was the go to place for local Brooklynites to share information and read about the tornadoes that touched down in the hood this fall. And a local Williamsburg resident even used the blog to find her lost puppy.

“The simple fact of the matter is nobody has quite cracked the hyper-local news market yet, and of all the attempts Neighborhoodr comes closest in terms of functionality, reach, quality and engaged users. We are also aware it’s going to take several more years before we’re at the intersection of hyper-local and user submitted blog content, but when we get there we hope to be right in the middle of it,” says Co-Founder Richard Blakeley.

Neighborhoodr is riding atop a pretty big wave. Tumblr hit 1.2 billion pageviews in the U.S. in October, up 1,540% from the year before, according to a recent TechCrunch article. Yesterday, Tumblr announced that their network has expanded to more than 11 million blogs. And RWW just reported that in fact Tumblr now has more page views and money than WordPress.

Co-founders Blakeley and DeRosa are bullish on Tumblr. “Tumblr is way more viral than Twitter and tweets have a short shelf life,” says Blakeley. “But Twitter does act like  CB radio, leading eyeballs to Tumblr.” Since they use Tumblr, they measure their user base by subscriptions not page views. In less than a year they’ve grown from 600 subscribers to over 3,000. ”I like to call re-blogs ‘sideways traffic,’” Blakeley says, “Because when you see something good enough, you just have to reblog it because it’s so easy.”

And the best part about Tumblr?  The site is free for users and there’s literally no overhead for the site. In fact, they haven’t put a penny into the operation since it started. But they have started to make money. They’ve signed up their first advertiser, Tanqueray, the gin company, that is sponsoring a “cocktail safari” in Manhattan for the team and their friends as I write this post. De Rosa says the blog will be a powerful tool for businesses who don’t want to take out expensive ads in sites like Eater but want to cheaply advertise to a hyper local, targeted market. While they haven’t nailed down a number yet, ad space on the site will be in the ball park of $100 p/month.

With 3,000 dedicated contributors who know how to spread content virally, I’m feeling pretty bullish on Neighborhoodr. After all, how could you live in a neighborhood, use Tumblr and not want to follow your local news?

The internal memo pasted below, sent to the Gawker staff from their chief technology officer Thomas Plunkett, reveals that the Gawker Hacker disaster happened in large part due to a lack of preparation and commitment by the media giant’s tech team. He apologizes to the staff and promises to be much more communicative in the future.

From: Thomas Plunkett

Subject: The Gawker Media security breach — status and moving forward
To: [Gawker staff]
Date: Friday, December 17, 2010, 4:43 PM

Everyone -

As you know, this has been the Gawker tech team’s most difficult week ever. This note has been too long coming, but the following is meant to communicate several things: what happened, our current activities, and our plans for moving forward. I suggest you read all of this as I am making several recommendations below, and we are implementing some changes that will affect all of you.

What Happened
Gawker Media servers and some company email accounts were compromised by hackers at some time during the last few weeks; the compromise was made public to us (and everyone else) this past weekend. In recent weeks, intruders were able to gain access to our web servers by exploiting a vulnerability in our source code, allowing them to gain access to user data and passwords. With this information, they were able to gain access to the editor wiki, some Gawker Media email accounts, and other external resources.

It is clear that the Gawker tech team did not adequately secure our platform from an attack of this nature. We were also not prepared to respond when it was necessary. These things can be attributed to several factors.

First, we never planned for such an event, and therefore had no systems, or processes in place to adequately respond. Our focus as a team (and company) has been on moving forward. This put up blinders on several fronts. As a result, numerous wrong decisions were made by me this past weekend in responding to the security breach.

Further, attention to completed work is every bit as important as attention to upcoming work. Our development efforts have been focused on new product while committing relatively little time to reviewing past work. This is often a fatal mistake in software development and was central to this vulnerability.

Finally, we have not only seen tremendous growth as a company, we have never been afraid to take an unpopular or controversial stance with regard to individuals or organizations. Let’s face it: we draw the ire of many. This creates a unique set of demands to meet rapid growth as well as threats that often specifically target us. We did not establish standards and practices to handle growth and the fact that we have a target on our back.

On several fronts — technically, as well as customer support and communication — we found ourselves unprepared to handle this eventuality. The tech team should have been better prepared, committed more time to perform thorough audits, and grown our team’s technical expertise to meet our specific business needs. As a result of not having done these things, we have not adhered to standards expected of us, and our response was inadequate. The remedy to this situation will not be immediate, but it will be swift as possible.

Current Activity: Regaining Control
The tech team have moved our operation to the third floor of the Gawker Media office in order to focus on the work that needs to be done. We are currently in the process of performing a complete review of what happened with an independent security firm.

Here’s what we’ve done so far to regain control:

We have been able to establish a fairly complete timeline of intrusion activity, and have identified compromised assets within Gawker. We have re-established control of compromised systems including our Google Apps accounts. As a result, you will have to reconfigure your Google Apps access (more on this below).

In addition, we have addressed all known vulnerabilities and will continue auditing our system for security flaws, and we have made appropriate changes to administrative accounts to our web and application infrastructure. There are many people reviewing our code base, and because of this, we will also reach out to members of the technical community to harness their expertise. This process will continue as we move to an entirely new, hardened web infrastructure.

We have introduced a help desk to address commenter concerns related to the breach. This will continue to exist as long as it is needed. Scott, Greg, Jeremy, Nick and a host of interns, and many of you, have been active in the threads, and communicating as much as possible as we work through this event.

Moving Forward
We’ve learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there’s one lesson nearly all of us learned, it’s that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords.

Efffective immediately, we have enabled SSL, a more secure method of communicating over the internet, for all users with Gawker Media accounts on Google Apps (this does not affect your personal Gmail). Those of you not using web-based Gmail will have to reconfigure your clients (this includes any desktop mail client as well as other devices). The attached document provides instructions to make this easier, and includes information to configure different devices including iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones.

Also effective immediately: If you require access to sensitive materials (legal, financial, or accounting documents) on Google Docs, you must have two-factor authentication setup on your account. No documents will be shared with personal Gmail accounts. We are also strongly encouraging all staff to setup two-factor authorization even if you do not require access to sensitive material.

We will enforce a policy that sensitive information not be posted to the editor wiki. This policy will also apply to chat communications (e.g., Campfire, AIM).

On all of our sites, we will be introducing several new features to our commenting system to acknowledge the reality that we have lost the commenters’ trust and don’t deserve it back. We should not be in the business of collecting and storing personal information, and our objective is to migrate our platform away from any personal data dependencies (like email & password). We will push further integration of external account verification sources using OAuth (like Facebook, Twitter, and Google) for those that want to use them, and we’ll also be introducing disposable accounts. Disposable accounts are similar to the service a pre-paid phone offers to drug dealers (a disposable, untraceable communication device). Commenters seeking anonymity will be able to do so confident that when necessary they can simply toss out the account and there will be no connection to the individual. They will work like this:
- no password will be stored
- no email will be stored
- account can be used as long as you have the key code; lose or delete it, the account is abandoned.

In addition, we are establishing a public Gawker Tech & Product blog (a long time coming) from which we will communicate product information as well as product plans to our readers. You can expect to see it by early next week.

This has been a very unfortunate event in Gawker Media history, and we have learned much from it. Above all, this has been an enormous inconvenience for everyone affected, and for this I apologize. You can expect a much more responsive and proactive technology and product team for 2011. You can also expect a much more public me — if there is one critical thing that has been missing, it is a lack of consistent communication from me. That will change.

Regards,

Tom Plunkett

Got an e-mail from LinkedIn this morning? LinkedIn may have suspended your account to protect its users from any further data breach.

The e-mail read: “…In order to ensure that you continue to have the best experience using LinkedIn, we are constantly monitoring our site to make sure your account information is safe. We have recently disabled your account for security reasons…” The message goes on to explain how to reset your password.

This morning, they tweeted, “sorry for the inconvenience, as a proactive measure we’ve reached out to users potentially affected by the gawker breach regarding password”

LinkedIn has a security team that keeps them abreast of everything that’s current on the Internet. They take action on anything deemed relevant or potentially threatening to their 85 million members’ LinkedIn profiles. The team downloaded the list of e-mails that had been harmed by the hacks and overlapped the list with all LinkedIn accounts. LinkedIn wouldn’t disclose the number of people they emailed but it was a small fraction of LinkedIn’s users on the Gawker list. LinkedIn did not match passwords, but only looked at the corresponding e-mail addresses.

In the interest of safety LinkedIn shut down and suspended every person’s account who was on the list. “We just wanted to stop the Gawker messages and passwords by going further than they already have,” said LinkedIn.

In their blog post today, LinkedIn writes,

Many of you may have heard by now that a prominent blog had its commenting system hacked into and a large number of user names and passwords were exposed.

As we closely monitored the situation, we decided it was imperative to take preemptive action to help ensure that those leaked passwords were not being used to attack any LinkedIn members.

Here’s how we’ve taken steps to address this situation in the past 24 hours. We’ve identified a very small fraction of our members whose accounts could potentially be affected by the recent breach. If you were in the group of users who may have been at risk, you should have received an email with instructions to reset your password. Note, to make sure we have you covered, you will receive an email from us to each email you have on file. You only need to act on one of them.

Even if you weren’t affected, it is a good reminder to proactively manage your online accounts. The number one tip is to use a unique password for each site. For additional tips check out my other post on security here.

LinkedIn acted commendably and safely to keep their name clear as well as to stop users from having more information stolen. For a complete run down of Gawker’s security hacks this weekend, read our earlier post.

We just wrote a post on the easiest way to check if your e-mail address is on Gawker‘s Hacker List, but we realize it may have been a little tricky.

Our good friends at Slate have built a simple widget to find  out whether your info was indeed on Gawker’s hacked list. Just type in your e-mail address and voila. Test it out here. It looks like this:

Phew!

Gawker is getting a makeover. We wrote about it weeks ago. Today, Nick Denton is positioning his new design as the driving force of a blogging revolution, writing that it “represents some convergence of blog, magazine and television.”

Gawker’s new beta version is up and running. They’ve shifted the blog scroll from the center of the page to the right to make room for a splash page, and its latest stories now only displays headlines. From there, Denton writes that every inside page will follow in the same format. “No matter whether the visitor keys in the site address or arrives from the side by a link on Facebook or elsewhere, he or she will be greeted not just by a story but by an index of other recent items.”

Reasons Behind The Redesign

Scoops. After feeling the TMZ burn, when the celebrity site eclipsed Gawker’s Defamer, Denton writes that the new blog format’s ”visually appealing ‘splash’ story” will better service their top stories. His description of its visual effect doesn’t convince me of its “revolutionary power” after seeing Tron movie star Jeff Bridges flash in and out of Richard Branson’s new iPad magazine cover today. But what is rather smart about his decision to highlight one splash story is that he will leave the story up as long as it’s generating interest, such as the early shots of the iPhone 4 that brought Gizmodo millions of page views. This gives the splash story the visual (and monetary) impact of a magazine cover.

Aggregation. Social networks both help and hurt news sites. They generate an audience but they also detract from readership because sites like Facebook and Twitter provide each user with a personalized river of news, curated by the user’s social network. In addition, on a blog, the more short stories Gawker runs, the more rapidly other potentially high value stories get pushed off the page, which is exhausting for both writer and reader. To compete, Gawker will break down stories into two different classes within two editorial teams- the curator or editor and the producer or scoopmonger, but Denton doesn’t elaborate on these breakdowns much more than that. We imagine that means editors will be able to curate content, separating the strongest or “breakout” stories and giving those more home page love.

A rounded personality? Read: re-branding. A certain agency executive recently told Denton that Gawker Media‘s greatest weakness was that they were seen as being of the “gutter.” He writes, “That’s the price one pays for publishing the stories that others won’t touch, for embracing the sensational.” Again, he points to the site’s splash page, saying that it will provide the opportunity to display Gawker’s full editorial spectrum. So basically, he is using the splash page to demonstrate that Gawker possesses intelligence and isn’t just “Gutter journalism.”

A Focus on Web Video. Denton is focusing on video content both for editorial and advertising. With increasing Internet speeds, smartphones and DSLR cameras, webvideo is ubiquitous. Gawker’s new layout will be built around imagery: a video, a gallery, a striking image or, if the words are strong enough, a text graphic. The visual slot will be 64% larger than the current design. Gawker will run a 15-second video commercial between two editorial items, much like a commercial on TV. The editorial decision for video space is an obvious and much needed upgrade, while copping a lesson from TV is hardly revolutionary.

Changes for Advertisers. Denton is doing away with the week-by-week calendar, which required foresight and was horribly outdated for an online atmosphere. Instead he is moving towards front-page “roadblocks,” a combination of custom ad units, sold as an exclusive for the day, which allow for more precise scheduling. The new editorial calendar will include scheduled events such as CES and holiday shopping, scheduled programming such as Lifehacker’s personal finance hour, but it will allow for more spontaneity, while still keeping advertisers happy. Gawker Media will avoid commodity ad networks and overcrowding a site with ads because it cheapens the site and devalues the brand. Instead they will focus on bringing in sponsors and creating more robust advertising packages. Again, borrowing from TV’s advertising model is not exactly forward thinking.

The new template may represent the most significant change in Gawker’s model since its launch in 2002, but that fact merely points out that maybe it was long, long overdue for a redesign. After all, nine years ago I was wearing flared jeans and baby tees; I’ve since given myself more than one necessary makeover.

Gawker’s redesign is primarily based on a new flashy, splash page that Denton hopes will help the site shake its snarky, “gutter journalism” image. It’s smart, but also necessary. It’s innovative if you believe that highlighting your site’s best stories is a new idea. Bottom line, Gawker’s redesign is more required than revolutionary.

Print is dead. The Web is dead, and according to Gawker Media’s British born founder Nick Denton, current forms of blogging may be next.

Beginning this January, Denton has announced that his nine blogs, including celebrity gossip site Jezebel, gadget sites Gizmodo and Lifehacker and of course the the eponymous media news umbrella Gawker.com will be starting 2011 with a new design aimed to improve quality and emphasize originality. The new design will eschew their current reverse chronological format of endless posts for a new format resembling a “newsmagazine” and dominated by a single story. Other posts will be delegated to a stream of headlines on the right-hand side.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Denton explained, “I’m out of blogs…I don’t want to be the No. 1 blog network anymore. That’s like being king of the playground.”

“I can’t bear to look at the current site,” Denton said. “It is so constricting.” Denton hopes the new design will draw attention to original work, not just scandalous news of Lindsay Lohan running over baby carriages. “The most popular story is not always the one we are most proud of,” he added. “There’s too much sex.” He also hopes to emphasize the growing video network with the new design, which received 17.3 million unique U.S. visitors in September. The new site will also create more space for video ads. “The new layout is optimized for video, so it’s going to be great for Gawker.TV,” says Richard Blakeley, Gawker.TV’s editor.

To preview the new Gawker.com and its sister sites, replace the www in the URL with beta—e.g., beta.gawker.com. The landing page is dominated by a large image, headline and single story with a list of other headlines will sit along the right side. In a recent New Yorker profile, Denton says that the redesign will “probably be seen as the end of the blog.”

Since Denton launched Gizmodo in 2002 a large number of media news sites have copied and admired his blogging instincts, SEO happy headlines and back-end analytics system. ”He has been pushing this envelope in terms of using technology,” said Om Malik in the Wall Street Journal, who has been blogging about technology on Gigaom.com since 2001. He has a talent for “nudging [users] along towards a new usage behavior.” Gawker’s CTO, Thomas Plunkett, said he believes the new design will double the network’s monthly page views to one billion a year after launch.

In the days of Twitter and Facebook, personal profiles turned soap boxes may be rendering traditional blog writing obsolete. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo recently reported on the subject, interviewing bloggers and editors to define the difference between an “article” and a “blog post.” As technology expands and the Internet takes on such a life of its own, a blogger’s clarity of purpose can become a bit blurred. When large media organizations re-tool their current strategies to disseminate news more quickly through an array of social media channels, it’s promising to see an emphasis placed on original news and richer multi-media content.