Gawker Media thinks it can reach 80-million unique visitors a month by the end of 2014, while the New York Times currently boasts 31 million. Gawker clearly doesn’t turn out better content nor does it traffic in eyeball-grabbing gossip nearly as much as it used to. If you want blind items and reveals, you go elsewhere. Those running Gawker are simply better at understanding the new normal (including viral bullshit) and exploiting this knowledge, which is easier for them in many ways because they’re not hidebound to traditional journalistic ethics. The New York Times is certainly doing better, more important and more challenging work, but it’s not doing as well. Here’s my question: Is that because those in charge of the Times don’t understand the terrain, or is it because doing the kind of work the Times does can’t find traction in 2014? I would say the former, but it’s not like any other traditional newspaper company has managed the feat, either. From Peter Sterne at Capital: 

“Gawker has never made a secret of its ambitions as it has risen from Manhattan media troublemaker to a network of niche-focused sites that apply its roguish sensibility to topics ranging from sports to women’s issues. Founder Nick Denton spent the first part of 2014 positioning his company as a sort of anti-Buzzfeed, and there’s his Kinja commenting platform that he hopes will do nothing short of reshape the very nature of online discussion. And while Denton has always seemed to take a particular glee in publicly critiquing and encouraging his own operation (and tweaking the competition) along the way, concrete growth plans at Gawker have been harder to come by.

In order to achieve its goals, [editorial director Joel] Johnson announced plans for the company to increase its editorial staff by the end of the year from 120 full-time staffers to 150 full-time staffers and 24 active members of its ‘recruits’ farm system. A slide accompanying Johnson’s presentation declared that hiring is the site’s number one priority, and he told his staff that they had an effectively unlimited hiring budget.

‘If things go right, we could double our editorial staff by the end of 2015,’ he said.”