Gawker Media: Manager and Communication

Gawker Media: Manager and Communication

Gawker Media Offices

NYC

One of the things I’ve really learned: We started off as more of a virtual organization with more of the communication being online through IM, through references in the Wiki, but one of the things that we’ve discovered I think, in the last um two or three years, os the virtue and the value of traditional, in person communication.

Communication in the modern world is a fast boiling soup of old world print media, cutting edge technology and timeless interpersonal skills. The balance between these techniques, however, is constantly shifting.

Gaby Darbyshire

Chief Operating Officer

Um, I find I very rarely use the phone anymore. And that I think is quite interesting. Um, there are some people who always want to do things on the phone and obviously if you’re an editor, you’re a reporter, you’re an investigator, you’re on the phone a lot. I typically don’t want to be on the phone, partly because I do legal stuff and want to remember what was said and have a record and all of that stuff.

With offices in both New York City and Budapest, Hungary, and with freelance writers working all over the world, Nick Denton’s Gawker Media, home to dozens of websites ranging from its popular Gizmodo consumer technology blog to life hacker’s daily productivity tips, has attracted talent as edgy as its reviews and criticism.

The key question in the hiring the top level on the editorial side is that balance between, you know, just crazy enough, but not so crazy that somebody is dysfunctional within the organization. Sometimes people can take our public image a little bit too seriously when they join. And so, one of the biggest problems we have with a site like Gawker itself, our Flash website, is that people write in the style that they imagine we want, that they imagine the site is all about. And, therefore, they tend to exaggerate the characteristics. Gawker.com has a reputation for being snarky, mean, and that’s not necessarily our objective. But it’s the short-hand description of the site. And so, often, new writers when they come in, they write, um, in a fashion that is, quite frankly, it’s too snarky for us. We have to train them out of their impression of what Gawker is and try to teach them to be surprising, um, you know, no holds barred in the editorial, but not necessarily, automatically knee-jerk snarky.

Managing Communications in an Internet World

Given the style of its brand, Gawker fosters a lot of personal responsibility and independent thinking amongst its employees. But it also requires conformity to certain principles and guidelines, such as style guides for each of its online nameplates.

Ray Wert

Editor In Chief, Jalopnik

At Gawker, we have an internal Wiki-tool that allows us the opportunity to constantly educate our employees on changing tool sets that are available to them whether it’s something like Getty Images, or AP images, or how to create photo galleries, or how to use a new tool set that we’ve created internally in our own content management system. We have an ability with the Wikipedia to provide that training on an ongoing basis rather than bringing everyone into one centralized location. There’s a huge cost that’s associated with that that we don’t have to worry about.

Face-to-face- meetings at Gawker between its various locations are limited to a few off-site conferences per year. Yet, even given its technology savvy profile, Gawker also shies away from formal virtual meetings and teleconferences.

We have an editorial meeting once a week, and at the beginning, when we first started this, editors who lived in other cities would dial in on a speakerphone. But what we found was that’s actually incredibly distracting. Not only for the people in the room because they’re not normally thinking about speaking to the speakerphone, and then the people on the other end say they can’t hear, and the whole thing gets disrupted. And so, we gave up pretty quickly on the idea of making people participate remotely. It might be different with a video conferencing system, but if you’re in a conference with six other people, I could imagine that that would also be a minefield. So, yeah, there are some down sides to remote working, which is that you don’t get as much personal interaction and people brainstorm and bounce ideas off of each other and have great insights so much more when they are together.

Modern technological advances like wireless devices have improved access, but trends in their usage may actually be rolling back personal communication in key ways. For example, cell phones are now used more to send text messages than they are for speaking to people directly.

There is something that is lost by not having that interpersonal relationship with people. And I think that it causes some of our writers to sometimes feel like they’re disconnected from the rest of us. And it sometimes makes them feel like they are disconnected from their real life world because they spend so much of their time on instant messenger, on Skype, on, um, Twitter, and on the blog that it really, it forces them to sometimes shut down everything and go I need to take a step back, I need to go outside, I need to take a walk around the block, I need to do whatever is necessary to be able to bring myself back to reality, and remember the bigger picture of what they are writing about. I think that is extraordinarily important.

Communicating in Specific Global Markets

Gawker recognized that localization issues, such as language translation and writing towards a specific culture were way out of the New York office’s expertise. In Japan, for example, they certainly didn’t want to hire and relocate a bunch of Japanese talent, so they did something far more practical: They hired a firm in Japan that was already versed in online publishing in that country.

The important part is picking the right partner, making sure they understand what you stand for and all of those things. And then, you simply have to trust them. I don’t speak Japanese, so, for example, our Japanese partners, they’re brilliant, they know the online media world back to front. They used to be the people who ran Wired Japan, so they have a lot of experience in this area. And we do have writers in Japan who could, I suppose, sit there are read the site every day and tell us what they liked and didn’t like, but what we tend to find happens is the readers, um, the loyal readers will let you know if they don’t like something.

For a company that made its name using modern technology to, in many ways, supplant traditional media, Gawker seems to have come back around to rediscovering the fundamental importance of the most basic unit of communication: one-to-one interaction.

You know, we have a virtual company, and that makes a lot of people very happy. Um, it’s a great way of working, but there are times that you want everyone in the same room. And we had an off-site, actually, for editors a couple of weeks ago, and everybody flew in from around the country, and it was the most unbelievably productive and fantastic brain storming day.

And that was a transforming experience, um, pretty traditional. Something that I think traditional companies actually have to teach us rather than, you know, us to teach them.

Pearson