blog no more?

In a media class built atop blogging it's only natural to focus on this underlying media at some point. With relentless media coverage on social media, including mobile media upstarts such as Foursquare, blogs have fallen somewhat out of the limelight of late.


One example of the changing nature of blogs is the Gawker media empire:


       


Nick Denton is the creator of this blog empire, but he recently announced that he's moving his media properties away from blogs and toward online magazines. And so Gawker's traditional blog, which looked like this:

will now look like this:

The difference between the two (the new beta version can be found here) is one of curation; the first is just a typical reverse-chronological blog scroll of entries while the new one has more editorial input as far as placement and thus the context of stories. Given Gawker's ironic, snarky tone, this move allows the editors to juxtapose stories snarkily against each other - again, with props to McLuhan, the media is ever more so the message here.

Why the redesign? 

Denton wants to increase his already formidable audience. When Gizmodo was the first to leak an image of the iPhone 4, the blog's traffic quadrupled for the week. However, because the story was so hot, the blog actually had to stop posting new entries for six hours so that it could keep that traffic generator at the top of the page; otherwise, it would be burying the hottest story it'd probably ever had. Turning the blog into more of an online newsmagazine, with one main story at the top anchoring smaller, related ones below it will allow Denton to keep hot stories on fire and drive traffic to those smaller stories as well.  

At the same time, the new format will also allow for more effective use of images and video. As Denton explains, "People don't really want to read text. They want videos, images, bigger and more lavish." 

As a result of this move, founder Denton expects his 450 million monthly page views to balloon to one billion monthly page views within a year of the relaunch.  

Says Denton: "I'm out of blogs. I don't want to be the No. 1 blog network anymore. That's like being king of the playground."

After reading this, I went over to Technorati, the premier blog directory, to get some blog statistics for this post. When I got there, though, I stopped in my tracks. What used to itself be a blog now looks like... a Denton newsmagazine.