Power players: five gay and lesbian entrepreneurs who are making the world go 'round

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THE DARK LORD FEELS THE HEAT

NICK DENTON built a fiefdom of blogs from the popularity of his snarky media gossip site Gawker. Then one day he realized he was 3 million page views down. Now loyalists are bolting as the Internet industrialist shakes up his world {BY TIME MURPHY}

"IF GAWKER WAS GONE TOMORROW," says Huffington Post blogger Rachel Sklar, "who would miss it?"

A bold question, particularly when you consider that Gawker, the must-read media industry blog launched in 2002, was once the place for a daily diet of tidbits on everything from Rupert Murdoch's latest dastardly deed to what the willowy girls at Vogue were (or were not) eating in the Conde Nast cafeteria.

But in mid-January, after dropping 3 million page views between October and December 2007, Nick Denton, the site's cagey founder, decided to do what entrepreneurs do best-take a risk. While Gawker once focused almost entirely on the foibles of an elite New York City media core, it would suddenly find space for the Tom Cruise/Britney Spears bits covered to death on countless other websites. Gawker was going mainstream.

Many viewed the change as a desperate effort to cash in on low fare like "pictures of Lindsay Lohan's vagina," as Choire Sicha, Gawker's former managing editor, jokingly put it. Sicha, who's also gay, quit the blog at the end of December--mainly, he claims, because he was burnt out. "I was tired of working 14 hours a day six days a week. I hadn't been to the gym since I started that job."

Denton didn't win any loyalty points when in December he announced he was tweaking how his writers were going to be paid. Rather than give people a flat fee per post, Gawker would augment writers' base salaries with bonuses generated by how many times people viewed their posts. Sicha and another senior blogger resigned.

Whether it was boredom or bravado that inspired Denton to shake up his business is anyone's guess. But what's important is that he appears to have unleashed on his own staff a bit of the signature bitchiness he used to aim at media moguls. Had the general turned on his troops? "There are certainly signs that Gawker ... is in the midst of a particularly intense period of turmoil," wrote Allen Salkin in a January 13 article in The New York Times. "As messy and mean as Gawker could be, it was an addiction to many journalists, obsessively clicking in search of the diversion that fresh gossip about colleagues and their bosses offered from the toil of reporting and editing the news."

NICK DENTON DECLINED TO BE INTERVIEWED for this piece--"I really would, but am so busy this month"--despite numerous phone calls and e-mail requests. "And everything is out there pretty much," he offered by e-mail. It wasn't a surprise. Like gay Internet potentate Matt Drudge, Denton rarely speaks to the press.

"He'll only talk to you if he has a message to get out," says Sklar. For example, when Denton announced that he would become Gawker's managing editor late last year (to fill the place Sicha left open) and would post items himself, he promptly got in touch with Sklar. "That first day, all of a sudden he was going pingping-ping to me," she says, mimicking the sound of instant messages arriving, "about numbers and this and that. He wanted me to write about stuff."

A British-born former Financial Times reporter who made a small fortune on an early Internet social-marketing venture before starting Gawker, Denton parlayed its initial success into a full-on armada of 15 blogs, each one fixated on a different niche. There's Valleywag for Silicon Valley, Defamer for Hollywood's entertainment industry, and Wonkette for Washington politics. Jalopnik covers cars, Gizmodo takes on gadgets, and 109 just launched to tackle your daily science-fiction needs. Altogether Gawker Media brings in an estimated $10 million to $12 million annually, according to New York magazine's back-of-the-envelope calculations last fall.

Although some of the sites attract millions more page views than Gawker, the flagship blog, with its addictive cocktail of news, smear, and innuendo, has earned Denton his "dark lord" moniker.

"He's got a big head-literally," says one leading media critic who's been zapped frequently by Gawker and won't go on the record for fear of reprisal. "He looks like Linus [from "Peanuts"], and he wears the stripy shirts to go with it. But he's not a huge personality. I think he likes being the man behind the curtain."

One current Gawker contributor, who spoke anonymously because "my job is on the line," says that working for Denton "has always been nerve-racking. But he knows what he's doing--or at least is good at making it up. He doesn't sell out his employees if he believes in them. Nor is he afraid to whip people into shape."

So it's hard to figure why he'd let Sicha and another popular Gawker writer, Emily Gould, walk away. Sicha's tart, brainy voice made him a popular blogger for the site, in addition to his role as managing editor. Surely his departure would put a dent in Denton's coveted hits, right? As Reed Phillips of investment firm Desilva and Phillips observes of successful blogs, "If the talent goes away, then presumably the traffic follows."