Nick Denton Quotes

#1. Is there Gawker ethics? I mean, I guess there's Gawker ethics. It's a dangerous thing to talk about.

Nick Denton

#2. Your writers write these pieces about meaningless startups, meaningless apps and meaningless companies.

Nick Denton

#3. Publishing should be a collaboration between authors and their smartest readers - and at some point the distinction should become meaningless,

Nick Denton

#4. No picture, no footage, no story. The people these days require some visual evidence in order to believe what they read.

Nick Denton

#5. It's harder now for journalists to do stories about billionaires, like Peter Thiel, without having at the back of their minds the fear that maybe somebody deep-pocketed, you know, with limited resources is going to come after us and can my organization afford to defend me?

Nick Denton

#6. 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.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#8. While I love the medium, I've always been skeptical about the value of blogs as businesses.

Nick Denton

#9. I think straight couples have a schedule: You're together for two years and then there's the 'where is this going?' question, which wouldn't necessarily be good for everyone, but I think it's pretty healthy for relationships, for there to be a presumption that there is a decision to be made.

Nick Denton

#10. 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.

Nick Denton

#11. I have to come to terms with the paternalism of American business. Companies are expected to take on so many social responsibilities which are the province of the state in Europe.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#13. 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.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#15. 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.'

Nick Denton

#16. 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.

Nick Denton

#17. 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.

Nick Denton

#18. Personally, as a print journalist, I always found the most interesting stories to be the ones hacks talked about in the bar after work.

Nick Denton

#19. 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.

Nick Denton

#20. 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.'

Nick Denton

#21. 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.

Nick Denton

#22. Most good media come out of somebody saying, 'This should exist; this is something I want to read.'

Nick Denton

#23. The most interesting comments, they don't come from people with Klout scores. They don't come from people with a history on our sites.

Nick Denton

#24. I've never really understood people who climb socially by sucking up. It seems like the least efficient way to climb, and also the most psychologically debilitating.

Nick Denton

#25. I want to institutionalise and automate chequebook journalism.

Nick Denton

#26. 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.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#29. Superior writers, videographers and other content makers want to work with their own kind and for their own kind.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#31. 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.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#34. Forget about someone's resume or how they present themselves at a party. Can they blog or not? The blog doesn't lie.

Nick Denton

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

Nick Denton

#36. Ben Smith's quick-hit campaign 'scoops' are about as viral as cat videos. That fits with Buzzfeed.

Nick Denton