“I could do without The New York Times”
Gaby Darbyshire, C.O.O of Gawker Media, a brash Brit who runs the Gawker empire alongside “old friend” Nick Denton, appeared at Fordham Law today, demonstrating the arrogance that so-rankles many in print media, and surprisingly, a lot of naivety about how those under 30 approach media. From the word “go” Darbyshire attempted to dominate the panel discussing the struggles of print media in a digital world. Thankfully, she had a brilliant sparring partner in Richard Perez-Pena of the The New York Times. Throughout, he passionately defended his medium, while remaining realistic about the death of the old newspaper business model.
“You all pay for Flickr accounts, right?” Zero hands raised in the packed room. The same when asked about paid email accounts (zero hands, but many snickers). It was not the old-school print journalist that assumed we were ready to fork over money for online features and services, but Darbyshire, whose site thrives off free content. Perez-Pena, on the other hand, laughed off such a suggestion and predicted his kids would never pay for anything online. Gawker’s C.O.O. was convinced a classroom full of law students were so indoctrinated into paying for things like cell phone service that were would be quite receptive to paying for access to websites. Makes you wonder about the future of Gawker sites, doesn’t it?
Darbyshire and Perez-Pena were joined by David Lat of AbovetheLaw.com; Brandon Holley, former editor of Jane Magazine, now editor of Yahoo! Shine; and Iliya Fridman, Fordham alum and owner of a media law firm. While most of the fireworks flew between the Times and Gawker, Holley attempted the bridge the gap as a veteran of both old and new media. Lat stayed silent for much of the talk, simply confident in his site’s model of relying of reader tips to generate most of their news, keeping overhead low.
In the end, though Perez-Pena seemed to have the most realistic outlook on the future of media, they all seemed to slightly miss the point. As my friend Matt pointed out, “they failed to recognize that people our age see them as two separate products.” Blogs are excellent for up-to-the-second bites of news, but at least as long as Gawker treats its editors and staff as disposable, they will never have the next George Will or Nicholas Kristof. Though I’d love to one day make a living thriving off new media, listening to the passionate pleas of a real, dyed in the wool journalist makes me think it might not be so bad to fork over a few dollars a month to support the continued existence of traditional papers, but as Perez-Pena himself pointed out, I too may be a dying breed.
