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Say goodbye to Hollywood, baby. Defamer, the loved--but not loved enough--celebrity gossip blog has been folded into its parent blog, Gawker.
News broke yesterday, on a day when Hollywood had a little gold-dipped fella named Oscar on their minds, which Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke didn't see as a coincidence at all. Finke explains she'd "been hearing for awhile that the Gawker empire founder and chief exec [Nick Denton] was trying to sell Defamer, which accounts for only 2% of total traffic of his network of Internet websites and had been flat for the past year. Then Denton announced Defamer was officially on the block. He had one taker but the offer wasn't good enough."
So this morning, anyone looking for plain old defamer.com is being redirected to defamer.gawker.com, and can see that Gawker is calling Defamer their "Column From Hollywood." Denton rationalizes that this move will help take Gawker to a new level as a national gossip site (it was born as a Manhattan media and insider's gossip blog), but many believe that Defamer was moving towards its demise when its clever founder, Mark Lisanti, gave up the reins a year ago. (LAist interviewed the then 30-year-old who'd just emerged from anonymity back in 2005.)
Who's running the show now? Finke says "top Defamer editor Seth Abramovitch was offered a position with the merged Gawker/Defamer, but declined. The other Defamer writers, Stu VanAirsdale and Kyle Buchanan, were fired." She says the three men may be looking to work together on a new gossip endeavor, and in the meanwhile "Gawker's Richard Lawson will be assigned to the Defamer beat. And Gawker/Defamer is hiring a Hollywood gossip writer." Anyone interested?
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Sad sad sad. In a few shorts years Defamer became an institution.
We'll miss you.
The Denton empire jumped the shark long ago. But Defamer and Wonkette have remained regular reads for me even after Mark Lisanti and Ana Marie Cox moved on from those sites. Still, neither are what they once were, and the other Denton sites are mostly useless to me. Now the "Hollywood" site is going to be heaped in with the NYC site. Sigh
I have to say, Defamer had my attention for a period of time over a year ago... but it became less fun, interesting, insightful or informative to read. I think they lost an edge and with it, a lot of readers. I'm not sad to see the site that it became go (or be absorbed, whatever).
First Valleywag, then Consumerist, now Defamer.
As long as they don't kill Jalopnik, I'm fine
I'm worried about Jezebel - there've been some strange, unexplained changes lately, including the sudden end to Pot Psychology. Hopefully they're not next.