Fraulein Denton.Photo: Patrick McMullan
All is not well in the house of Denton. We hear that just one day after media reporter Richard Morgan began at Gawker.com, he’s already quit. Just yesterday, site owner and (new) managing editor Nick Denton made much ado about the Website’s brave new image for 2008, including a role for Morgan covering the TV networks. But it turns out Denton’s pledge to elevate more serious journalistic work on the blog wasn’t as fulfilled as Morgan had hoped. “I believed what Nick said about making the site more reported, making it more mainstream, and, vainly, thought that’s why he hired me,” Morgan told us over IM just now. The former freelance writer has covered science, media, ideas, and lifestyle for publications like New York (woot woot!), Forbes, the Times, Discover, and Slate. “[Denton] is erratic,” he told us. “There is no vision beyond page views. I was announced as being some kind of television beat writer. And I spent the day reading TV blogs and e-mailing and calling and meeting with TV folks. And Nick would tell me to post, like, something about Us Weekly getting Ashlee Simpson’s engagement wrong. And then he wanted me to do another on Playgirl.” “He is obsessed with the gay mafia,” Morgan added, which is confusing, because we never thought of Denton as being self-obsessed. Big-headed maybe, but in a purely physical way only. “Jesus spent three days in Hell,” Morgan said. “I could only handle one.”
Richard Morgan [Official site]
Update: Denton IMs with a response! “Richard Morgan didn’t so much quit as splutter out. We did manage to get two publishable posts out of him before that happened. I wish him luck at a more leisurely institution.”
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