The cool kid of micropublishing

Another Nick Denton story sighting, this time from PRWeek, which has a Q&A with the Gawker Media publisher. Among the nuggets:

I try to hire people who aren't going to become insiders too quickly. They're going to think of themselves first as representatives of the readers, rather than representatives of the establishment that lecture their readers. ...

We're going from a world where there were one million writers and nine million wannabe or frustrated writers - people who occasionally wrote "letters to the editor" or complaints to customer service departments. Now those nine million writers are publishing online. Most of the sites that they create are only going to be interesting to their friends and themselves. But new talent wins out, and talented writers are not going to have to go through the media organization mill to [get a chance to] express themselves after 20 years as a reporter when they finally get a picture and bylined column. It's almost impossible in print media for anyone who is young and feisty to express himself or herself. The only time, in traditional media, when you get to express yourself is when you're 60 and no longer have any opinions that speak to the person you once were. Blogs allow those types of writers to circumvent the usual journalistic training program. It allows them to have the voice they have when they're young, without having it knocked out of them.