Defamer does Hell-A and McLuhan proud
Nick Denton, the expat Brit and ex-FT hack turned serial blog-publisher, has expanded his gossip empire. First came Gawker, which covered Manhattan's insider scene. Wonkette, with its focus on Washington power, was next and now we have the brand-new Defamer. "LA is the world's cultural capital. Defamer is the gossip rag it deserves," says the blog, which Patric King has designed in a style that's just right for the subject city.
What would Marshall McLuhan have made of it all? Perhaps he anticipated Nick Denton in his groundbreaking Understanding Media, published exactly 40 years ago:
"If telegraph shortened the sentence, radio shortened the news story, and TV injected the interrogative mood into journalism. In fact, the press is now not only a telephoto mosaic of the human community hour by hour, but its technology is also a mosaic of all the technologies of the community. Even in its selection of the newsworthy, the press prefers those persons who have been accorded some notoriety existence in moves, radio, TV, and drama."
Nick Denton's blogging ventures, with their focus on gossip, fit perfectly in McLuhan's reading of dynamic media — telegraph, radio, moves, radio, TV — and his latest decision to concentrate on "those persons who have been accorded some notoriety existence" in Los Angeles is in perfect accordance with the great thinker's vision. We don't really know if blogs will become the political pamphlets or the broadsheet ballads of our time, but their ability to act as the gossipmongers of the global village is undisputed, as Nick Denton is now proving.
