By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Now, I’m not saying that I would be involved in this in any way, but just doing a back-of-the-envelope study of what I see in my Webstats and here’s my suggestion for how to start a successful new blog.
The first thing you would have to do is realize to manage your expectations. Blogs are dead. Apps are dead. We’re all in a holding pattern while we wait for the kinks to get worked out of the Metaverse.
And, yet, I think if you flipped the script some on your traditional blog that maybe, maybe you could pull it off. But you would need a wealthy patron to help you with the backend and marketing. Here goes, though.
If you were actually going to try to start a new Gawker-like blog now, you would really have to focus on celebrity news. But here’s the catch — you would need two or three people on staff who would simply use Tik-Tok all day and then turn around and write stories about what trends they saw. Tik-Tok would set the blog’s editorial agenda.
As such, right now, such a blog would be doing profiles of Julia Fox — or, hell, even turn her into the blog’s de facto mascot like Julia Allison was with the original Gawker way back when.
The point is — the reason why the undead Gawker is so meh right now is it has no spunk, no snark and it’s not laser focused on what Generation Tik-Tok is interested in. That’s the thing I’ve noticed about the new, undead Gawker. It just seems kind of indifferent to what’s really going on with pop culture.
If you want to be a pop culture media outlet, you have to be on the cutting edge of what people are talking about, and by definition, that means you have to be obsessed with Tik-Tok.
Anyway, the point is — you use the pop culture element of the blog to hang all the rest of the blog’s content on it. Come for the Tik-Tok meme talk, stay for a snarky feminist polemic or maybe a sexxxy snap of Julia Fox doing whatever it is that Julia Fox is doing at any particular moment.
This is just me mentally masturbating on a Sunday morning. I have no money and, hell, I don’t have any friends. I guess I occasionally get frustrated because I know, given the opportunity — and resources — I could probably bring back the spirit of the old Gawker with a new blog.
