“Any publicity is good publicity” seems to be Nick Denton’s mantra.
If you haven’t heard of Denton, check www.gawker.com, a five-year old blog that is setting the tone in the blogosphere.

With nearly 20 call-outs filled with insults, borrowed from Gawker.com, New Yorkmagazine’s profiled the blog and the man behind it in its cover story. “Greasy, Self-absorbed hipster,” “that skeletor,” “loser,” and “bloated has-been,” are some of the mockery printed on Oct. 22 issue cover.

Writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, one of the many deprecated by Gawker, took matters on her on hands and set out to discover why Denton and his lieutenants are fuming. Grigoriadis was undeterred by the Briton’s declining her request for an interview. She spoke to Gawker former and present writers, and several disgraced subjects of the gossip blog.

“The moment that he told me that he would not conduct an official interview with me, and I said I’d continue reporting without him, was perhaps the only one where I’ve seen him express emotion. For a split second, he was furious. His eyes flicked back and forth over mine like a metronome, searching for some clue to what I was planning, what angle I might be playing, and he spat out his denial with the intensity of a losing tennis player,” Gregoriadis wrote in her cover piece.

But she did not escape what she called the “Culture of the Bile.” Here is what Gawker wrote about her:

“Grigoriadis writes for New York Magazine. Her last article was entitled, ‘You Too Can Be a Celebrity Journalist!’ With that kind of work and the newfound fame that comes with a Times wedding announcement, she’s on the fast track to teaching a class at The Learning Annex.”

 (Ouch!)

Getting back on Denton, not only on her behalf, but on behalf of hordes of disgruntled journalists – some dubbed “slutty and increasingly sundamaged” – Grigoriadis covered her basis and put together “Everybody Sucks,”a 6,000-plus-word profile of Gawker and Denton, the former Financial Timesjournalist who created it. Some traces of the picture Grigoriardis painted, without her main subject cooperation:

“the complicate owner of the blog network Gawker Media;”
“attractive, upper-class gay Jewish Britton;”
“occasional unpleasantness with employees;”
“polite, quiet, and relentlessly confident, an effective poised leader whose true nature is amoral reckless, an unrufflable libertarian and libertine.”
“like Tina Brown, with whom he was intrigued in the past, he’s always loved using his position to playcast a social network with himself at the center.”

Journalists, publishing people, media junkies and God knows who else have talked to exhaustion about the end of print. If a Gawker-like scenario is what the future holds for journalists, make this Gregoriadis riff your mantra:

“In an insult culture, shamelessness is a crucial attribute.”

 A journalist myself, I am perplexed. But I have to say that the fact that Gawker took over New York magazine cover is definitely a sign of the times.