Oh, yeah, [they] hired someone.
This should be fun.
Radar has hired Moe from Jezebel.com — another Gawker blog. Radar’s online editor Alex Balk is a former Gawker editor, and he’s written a lot recently in his tumblelog about working again for a bit at Radar with another former Gawker editor, Choire Sicha. Pretty sure there’s a few other ex-Gawker employees at Radar now, too.
Radar pays freelancers well. I can say that. I am almost certain (but do not know for sure) that they pay much, much better than Gawker, and the last I knew, there was no pay-per-pageview system in place, either, as there is at Gawker.
I kind of wished at one point that Radar did pay per pageview, because a couple of my blog entries for them got some killer traffic (one was linked by Fark.com, for instance), but in general, I liked how Radar handled these things, and I imagine folks from the Gawker system might feel the same way. Still, there’s also that sense of the “old Gawker network” in place.
None of that is probably of interest to most readers of this blog, now that I think about it, since they’re usually coming from my true crime blog and blissfully unaware of that whole New York media hothouse (amazing if you’re living in New York right now and a part of that thing, isn’t it?). Hell, I’m only distantly aware of it through my association with Radar, which has been 99.8% positive, and the few tenths that were not positive aren’t worth noting.
I do wonder if the new thing I’m doing [read this for some explanation] — been working on it tonight — will put me in more contact with all that NY media bullshit. Not in the sense of moving to NYC, of course; I like where I’m at, and I like the fact that I can do what I do as a journalist from a little old house in little old Roswell, GA. But just in the sense that some people might take notice. A few might be impressed. Others might see it as an opportunity for target practice. I can handle that, if so, but that doesn’t mean I like it.
That’s one reason I knew I wouldn’t shutter this blog, though — it’s been a good outlet for me. To try other stuff, to just be strange, something I don’t mind admitting I am. And there are truly interesting tumblelogs out there, too. Since tumblrs aren’t well-indexed by Google, the best way to find good tumblelogs is to get your own tumblr.
Wonder if that was intentional?
Anyway — I have to admit I’ve become fascinated in a sort-of Marlin Perkinsish way with reading stuff written by and about the people in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Chelsea and elsewhere trying to get by as writers living in The City. And I admire many of them too — what I do now became an option late in my thirties; they’re mostly twenty-somethings. When I was in my twenties, I didn’t have the moxie or the motivation to even think of living in NYC. And unlike freelance writing, opera-singing is not something you can do in Roswell, or even Atlanta, GA and make much money. No, if anything, I had much more reason to contemplate going to New York back then. But I didn’t.
I don’t regret that. But I do respect anyone who has gone ahead and done that… even if they do it more out of guile than anything else.
ETA: Then again, as I just noticed on another tumblelog, Moe left a comment on a Gawker post last week that must have somehow been related to her move to Radar. By the way, if you followed the first link in Moe’s name above and read anything, that’s pretty much the only way you’ll understand Moe’s comment. And even then, it’s kind of insane. Good luck, Balk.
