Nick Denton, the former Financial Times reporter who has been hugely successful at commercialising blogs, has just performed some old-media style pruning at Gawker. According to The New York Times:
Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr Denton was summarily executing underperformers.
"We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company," Mr Denton said last week. "You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognize what isn't working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are."
