by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
There are a lot, and I mean, A LOT of problems with any suggestion that there might be anything like the old Gawker. Now, when I say “the old Gawker,” I mean the Gawker of around 2003-2004 that was very similar to the even older idea of Spy Magazine. The later Gawker was shit and the new, Undead Gawker is just…undead.
But it’s a nice summer evening and I think I’ll give you my vision for how I would bootstrap a new Spy Magazine-Gawker type publication.
I think if you were serious about doing it, you start the process by starting not a blog, but a podcast. You get someone like Emma “It Girl” Chamberlain (or even SNL cast member Sarah Squirm) to talk about pop culture in a way that The Youngs like. You might, in real terms, build the product from the ground up around her personality. Or something. Maybe find someone else who is cheaper.
But the point is — find a really interesting person to host a near-daily podcast about celebrities and pop culture. Then once that’s gotten some traction, you establish a blog that you point people to from the podcast. That’s how you would build traffic to the site.
Now, from my obsession with Webstats, I can tell you that there is an insatiable interest in celebrities and pop culture. Some of the most traffic that comes to this blog — that almost no one reads — comes from people interested in a stray post about this or that celebrity.
I would suggest you obsess about Julia Fox’s every twitch. She’s such an interesting person that it’s a shame that there’s not one specific publication that simply details what she’s been up to. And then, once you get enough traffic to the blog, you start to cover politics. And then you maybe build out a podcasting network.
Ta-dah!
