Quotes from Nick Denton

An employer would be a complete fool to let an image like college partying influence their hiring decisions.

Google and others truncate headlines at 70 characters. On the Manti Teo story, Deadspin's scoop fell down the Google search results, overtaken by copycat stories with simpler headlines. Deadspin's headline was 118 characters. Vital information - 'hoax' - was one of the words that was cut off.

I think people are sort of waking up to it now, how probably the biggest change in Internet media isn't the immediacy of it, or the low costs, but the measurability. Which is actually terrifying if you're a traditional journalist, and used to pushing what people ought to like, or what you think they ought to like.

Critics say Internet advertising suffers from limitless inventory, which depresses prices. These exclusive front-page sponsorships are not limitless. If HBO doesn't move quickly enough, Showtime can buy out Gawker and Jezebel for the key fall TV season. On any individual day, there isn't room for both of them; and that's healthy.

The original idea of blog publishing was that writer and reader would be on the same level. That it would be a conversation - not a lecture. People lost sight of that. We didn't. Kinja is designed to break down the walls of the ghettos. So that everybody - editor, writer, source, subject, expert, fan - can be a contributor.

You could argue that as web audiences have grown larger and advertisers have demanded scale, the web has dumbed down - like the mainstream media we so mocked.

There was a rivalry - and some pie-throwing. But that was probably because Gawker and Radar had more in common than they wanted to admit. Each was the other's future. Radar served up the exclusives I always envied. Gawker was actually comfortable on the web, in the medium Radar should have made its own.

Web media needs to move to TV metaphor - with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.

The idea of harnessing the intelligence of the readership has been lost in the quest for Facebook likes. For many, readers have become synonymous with hateful commenters. It's time for a renewed push to realize some of the original dreams of the web.

Jonah Peretti is one of the smartest web publishers out there. And Buzzfeed is an aggressive and dynamic company.

I don't really mind playing tabloid monster. I always liked those characters in the old movies.

My background is economics and maths. I think one of the reasons I studied humanities at all, or even went into journalism, is because, like, science and maths wasn't cool in England when I was growing up. No one ever talked to the engineering students at Oxford.

I regret the stories we didn't do - the stories that we knew about and talked about but didn't have all of, so didn't publish. The whole idea of Gawker was to remove the barrier between the thought and the talk - and the page.

Henry Blodget does occasionally have a new idea. If you're making a point about aggregation or the emptiness of modern journalism, he's far from the best target. Try Huffpo - or Gawker writers whose souls have been corroded by irony.

Apple makes beautiful products. I own a Mac Pro, a Mac Book, a Mac Mini, an iPad, an iPhone, pretty much the entire collection.

That's always been my test for what makes a story: is this something journalists would gossip with each other about?

Google demotes search results that don't get clicked on.

It's no wonder that new ventures such as The Daily look first to Gawker Media when staffing up. We should not wait for a poaching expedition to pay someone what they deserve. I apologize if that has been the case and will do better in 2012.

Three-quarters of our sites - Kotaku, Gawker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Lifehacker - are led by editors who built their careers within Gawker Media. That's the career path.

As a print journalist, if you hear a rumour you try to stand it up and if you can't, the story dies. With a blog you can throw the rumour out there and ask for help. You can say: 'We don't know if this is true or not.'

Relentless and cynical traffic-trawling is bad for the soul.

You know how the best story angles often spring from that thought you have on reading an article or watching a show - that thought you have before the responsible journalist in you comes up with something boring. I usually recommend people get in touch with their deep 'reptilian brain.'

It irritates me that everybody concentrates on Gawker, because it's just one of 15 sites and it doesn't even get the most traffic. It's a significant site, but it's not what we are.

We believe that the best Web content optimization strategy is something as old as journalism itself: the shocking truth and the authentic opinion.