Gawker Is Obsolete?

Alexander Nazaryan makes the case:

When Gawker first began, blogs were a renegade enterprise, sniping away at the edges of the media empire. They were seductive, and maybe even a little bit illicit. But now, some five years later, each newspaper has a plethora of blogs, and any major event will be blogged about before a drop of ink is spilled.

These days, for a blog to continue to be relevant, it cannot merely take shots at the media: rather, it needs to offer the same quality of writing that one expects from a newspaper or magazine. The best blogs are essentially fora for the kinds of shorter pieces that might not make it into a monthly, or even a weekly, journal. They are not, as Gawker has become, a repository for YouTube videos or celebrity sightings.