A hacker or hackers who claimed to be affiliated with hacking group Anonymous Norway focused their attention on the Twitter account of Anders Behring Breivik, who admitted to carrying out the terrorist attacks in Norway July 22 that claimed 77 lives.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. Gawker debuted a new look Monday, and editor-in-chief Remy Stern posted a guide to the site’s new layout. Highlights:
The biggest difference between the old version of the site and the new one you’re seeing today is that the front page is now dominated by one big story (or a roundup of several different stories), and a list of headlines appears in a column down the right side of the page. This allows us to display big, gorgeous images and videos on the front page of our site. And it allows readers to easily scan headlines without having to scroll down the entire page.
The redesign is a work in progress, and we’ll be fixing bugs and improving things in the weeks to come, but here’s what you need to know to get started:
When you come to Gawker, you often just want to scan through a number of stories at once. Now you have two ways to do that: You can flip through pages, and you can scroll through headlines.
If you like flipping through stories and glancing over the full text, video, and pictures for each one, you’ll want to use our “next post” button. It’s on the left side of the navigation bar at the bottom of the page. Clicking it takes you through the day’s stories one at a time. You can also flip through the pages using your keyboard: Just use the right and left arrow key to page through the day’s stories.
If you’d rather just scroll through headlines, you can use your scroll button or up/down arrow keys to move through the stories in the right-hand column, which are displayed in reverse-chronological order. There is also a “next headlines” button at the bottom of that column, which will allow you to scroll through a bunch of headlines at a time.
At the top of the right-hand column, you’ll see three icons: a house, a flame, and a magnifying glass. What do they do? Click the house if you want to see today’s stories. Click the flame for today’s most popular stories. Click the glass for search.
Gawker Media founder Nick Denton was pleased with December’s results at his network of sites, particularly flagship site Gawker and sports destination Deadspin, which were largely driven by two scoops — the foot fetish video that featured the wife of New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, and a hysterical reply on Cleveland Browns letterhead to a letter to the football club complaining about paper airplanes. From Denton’s memo to staff, via Romenesko Memos:
I’d hoped to begin the year with the rousing plan for the new layout. But that’s been held back to the end of the month. So I’ll save the big harangue.
The median growth from December 2009 to last month was 45 percent. Deeply impressive! But the two sites that stood out were Deadspin and Gawker, up 91 percent and 85 percent, respectively. What marked them out? Scoops. This month’s highlights: the foot fetishist and this wonderfully rude email to a whiny fan.
Gawker Media continues to recover from a bad week after being forced to admit that its most popular sites like Gizmodo, Gawker and Lifehacker were left open to hackers who tapped into the usernames, email addresses and passwords of more than one million registered users. Now there’s news that the sites’ dedicated, and typically web-savvy, users are surprisingly not online privacy-savvy, or maybe just careless.
Slate has a handy tool for Gawker readers who are concerned about whether their email addresses were compromised in the hacker attack on the latter this past weekend: Just go to this page and enter email addresses into the widget.
There was some batty news out of Gawker Media: Chris Batty news, to be specific. Silicon Alley Insider posted an email to Gawker staff from founder Nick Denton announcing the departures of vice president of sales Batty and director of sales Michael Cascio. Denton’s email, via Silicon Alley Insider:
Yes, this may be a shock to some of you. Chris Batty and Michael Cascio, Gawker Media’s longtime head of sales and marketing and sales leader, are leaving the company at the end of December. In the new year, we will begin a search for a replacement; we will be looking at candidates both from the digital world and those with TV experience. Chris will coordinate the recruitment. Applicants should contact him directly. In the interim, the sales operation will be overseen by (sales director Gabriela Giacoman), who first brought Chris in.
It’s easier than usual to give the corporate bromides about departing colleagues because Batty and Cascio have such an impressive track record. No exaggeration is needed. Under Chris — and with help from (chief operating officer) Gaby Darbyshire‘s international deals — the company’s annual revenue has increased tenfold. The increase since 2005 translates into a 56 percent annual growth rate. This quarter will be by some margin our largest ever. Chris and Michael are ending on the highest of notes.
