Limits at Gawker? Rules at Reddit? Wild West Web Turns a PageFacing the abrupt resignations of two of his top editors on Monday and a potential revolt inside his newsroom, Gawker Media’s founder and chief executive, Nick Denton, tapped out a long memo to his editorial staff.
Mr. Denton wanted to explain his decision to delete a radioactive post about a married male media executive’s unsuccessful attempt to hire a gay escort and to contain the fallout from that decision inside his company.
But the memo also included a startling admission: “The Gawker brand,” Mr. Denton wrote, “is both confusing and damaging.”
In other words, Mr. Denton was repudiating the identity of the website he had spent 12 years building. And he was doing so just days after Steve Huffman, the chief executive of Reddit, had taken a strikingly similar step to distance his company from its own anything-goes past.
There has been no shortage of discussion about how legacy media companies will find their way forward in the digital age. But in trying to recalibrate their identities, Gawker and Reddit are demonstrating that digital media companies are struggling to manage a difficult transition of their own — from financially underachieving, if popular, start-ups to thriving, mature businesses.
“This feels like a moment of reckoning to me,” said Vivian Schiller, the former head of news at Twitter who was previously an executive at The New York Times. “We’re moving from the early days of ‘We’re free to write or post whatever we want,’ to the reality of building a business.”
In his memo, Mr. Denton sketched out what was essentially a new vision for Gawker, calling for the creation of more “humane guidelines.” As he put it: “We need a codification of editorial standards beyond putting truths on the Internet.”
For his part, Mr. Huffman, in the face of mounting evidence that Reddit’s theoretically self-governing community had descended into an often noxious form of anarchy, proposed a new content policy for users, or Redditors, as they’re known. It would ban, among other things, illegal activity, harassment and sexual content involving minors.
Neither Gawker nor Reddit is talking about imposing the sorts of rules and standards that have long governed the behavior of traditional media companies. But that they are talking about rules and standards at all represents a significant departure for both of them — one that reflects the practical limits of absolute freedom of expression, even for native Internet companies that have prided themselves on their opposition to what they see as self-censorship.
It was inevitable that these companies would eventually find themselves at this juncture. “There is an Internet strategy, which is audience and growth first, business model second,” said David Pakman, a partner at Venrock, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies. “Because of that ordering, the challenges that the pursuit of a business model presents manifest themselves later in life.”
Gawker and Reddit are very different businesses, in terms of both mission and scale. One is a modest-size provider of editorial content, the other an online message board with 170 million regular monthly users. But the two companies were created within a few years of each other: Gawker in 2002, Reddit in 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/business/media/limits-at-gawker-rules-at-reddit-wild-west-web-turns-a-page.html?_r=0
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